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My wish: The Charter for Compassion

Karen Armstrong

{0: 'Karen Armstrong'}

{0: ['religious scholar']}

{0: 'Karen Armstrong -- winner of the 2008 TED Prize -- is a provocative, original thinker on the role of religion in the modern world.'}

2008-02-28

2008-03-19

TED2008

en

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

['TED Prize', 'collaboration', 'faith', 'global issues', 'religion']

{130: 'We can be Buddhas', 91: "Invest in Africa's own solutions", 341: 'The moral roots of liberals and conservatives', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 647: "Let's revive the Golden Rule", 1327: 'Atheism 2.0'}

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

People want to be religious, says scholar Karen Armstrong; we should help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help build a Charter for Compassion -- to restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.

Well, this is such an honor. And it's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world. And I'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. And I'm also rather surprised, because when I look back on my life the last thing I ever wanted to do was write, or be in any way involved in religion. After I left my convent, I'd finished with religion, frankly. I thought that was it. And for 13 years I kept clear of it. I wanted to be an English literature professor. And I certainly didn't even want to be a writer, particularly. But then I suffered a series of career catastrophes, one after the other, and finally found myself in television. (Laughter) I said that to Bill Moyers, and he said, "Oh, we take anybody." (Laughter) And I was doing some rather controversial religious programs. This went down very well in the U.K., where religion is extremely unpopular. And so, for once, for the only time in my life, I was finally in the mainstream. But I got sent to Jerusalem to make a film about early Christianity. And there, for the first time, I encountered the other religious traditions: Judaism and Islam, the sister religions of Christianity. And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all — despite my own intensely religious background, I'd seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity, and I knew nothing about Islam at all. But in that city, that tortured city, where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together, you also become aware of the profound connection between them. And it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be, and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light. And I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days when I thought I'd had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract. And to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief — which we make such a fuss about today — is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word "belief" itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I'm exploring in a book I'm writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions, a credo. "I believe:" it did not mean, "I accept certain creedal articles of faith." It meant: "I commit myself. I engage myself." Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Quran, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as "zanna:" self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. (Laughter) So if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I've found, across the board, is that religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something. You behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice. Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other in the way we've been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call "God" or the "Divine." It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine. And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted — has said — and put at the core of their tradition what's become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." That, he said, was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was — the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called "ren," human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself. And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There's a famous story about the great rabbi, Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it." (Laughter) And "go and study it" was what he meant. He said, "In your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule." The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of Scripture which led to hatred and disdain, or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate. Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. Scripture, he says, "teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it." And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life. (Applause) But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is — where religion has been hijacked. Where terrorists cite Quranic verses to justify their atrocities. Where instead of taking Jesus' words, "Love your enemies. Don't judge others," we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using Scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things. So the traditions also insisted — and this is an important point, I think — that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group: your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called "jian ai": concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another. And this, again — this universal outreach — is getting subdued in the strident use of religion — abuse of religion — for nefarious gains. Now, I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history. Wrong. The causes of our present woes are political. But, make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line, and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem. Our modernity has been exceedingly violent. Between 1914 and 1945, 70 million people died in Europe alone as a result of armed conflict. And so many of our institutions, even football, which used to be a pleasant pastime, now causes riots where people even die. And it's not surprising that religion, too, has been affected by this violent ethos. There's also a great deal, I think, of religious illiteracy around. People seem to think, now equate religious faith with believing things. As though that — we call religious people often believers, as though that were the main thing that they do. And very often, secondary goals get pushed into the first place, in place of compassion and the Golden Rule. Because the Golden Rule is difficult. I sometimes — when I'm speaking to congregations about compassion, I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate. (Laughter) Now — but that's not the whole story. Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propelled me into public life, in a way that I'd never imagined, I've been able to sort of go all over the world, and finding, everywhere I go, a yearning for change. I've just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures, because they were yearning, first of all, to hear a friendly Western voice. And especially the young people were coming. And were asking me — the young people were saying, "What can we do? What can we do to change things?" And my hosts in Pakistan said, "Look, don't be too polite to us. Tell us where we're going wrong. Let's talk together about where religion is failing." Because it seems to me that with — our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that doesn't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. And religion, with its wide following ... Here in the United States, people may be being religious in a different way, as a report has just shown — but they still want to be religious. It's only Western Europe that has retained its secularism, which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned. But people want to be religious, and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world, which it can and should be — because of the Golden Rule. "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you": an ethos that should now be applied globally. We should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves. And these — whatever our wretched beliefs — is a religious matter, it's a spiritual matter. It's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all. And as I say, there is a hunger for change out there. Here in the United States, I think you see it in this election campaign: a longing for change. And people in churches all over and mosques all over this continent after September the 11th, coming together locally to create networks of understanding. With the mosque, with the synagogue, saying, "We must start to speak to one another." I think it's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other. I'd — there's one story I'd just like to mention. This comes from "The Iliad." But it tells you what this spirituality should be. You know the story of "The Iliad," the 10-year war between Greece and Troy. In one incident, Achilles, the famous warrior of Greece, takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers. And in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed — and killed in single combat by one of the Trojan princes, Hector. And Achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge, and he mutilates the body. He kills Hector, he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family, which means that, in Greek ethos, Hector's soul will wander eternally, lost. And then one night, Priam, king of Troy, an old man, comes into the Greek camp incognito, makes his way to Achilles' tent to ask for the body of his son. And everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself. And Achilles looks at him and thinks of his father. And he starts to weep. And Priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons, and he, too, starts to weep. And the sound of their weeping filled the house. The Greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people. And then Achilles takes the body of Hector, he hands it very tenderly to the father, and the two men look at each other, and see each other as divine. That is the ethos found, too, in all the religions. It's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies, and beginning to appreciate the other. It's of great importance that the word for "holy" in Hebrew, applied to God, is "Kadosh": separate, other. And it is often, perhaps, the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is God. And now, here's my wish: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule. We need to create a movement among all these people that I meet in my travels — you probably meet, too — who want to join up, in some way, and reclaim their faith, which they feel, as I say, has been hijacked. We need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos, and to give guidelines. This Charter would not be a massive document. I'd like to see it — to give guidelines as to how to interpret the Scriptures, these texts that are being abused. Remember what the rabbis and what Augustine said about how Scripture should be governed by the principle of charity. Let's get back to that. And the idea, too, of Jews, Christians and Muslims — these traditions now so often at loggerheads — working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand, at least, of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world. And you are the people. I'm just a solitary scholar. Despite the idea that I love a good time, which I was rather amazed to see coming up on me — I actually spend a great deal of time alone, studying, and I'm not very — you're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody, everybody on the planet. I've had some preliminary talks, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, is very happy to give his name to this, as is Imam Feisal Rauf, the Imam in New York City. Also, I would be working with the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations. I was part of that United Nations initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was asked by Kofi Annan to diagnose the causes of extremism, and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism. And the Alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it. The importance of this is that this is — I can see some of you starting to look worried, because you think it's a slow and cumbersome body — but what the United Nations can do is give us some neutrality, so that this isn't seen as a Western or a Christian initiative, but that it's coming, as it were, from the United Nations, from the world — who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this. And so I do urge you to join me in making — in this charter — to building this charter, launching it and propagating it so that it becomes — I'd like to see it in every college, every church, every mosque, every synagogue in the world, so that people can look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My wish: Find the next Einstein in Africa

Neil Turok

{0: 'Neil Turok'}

{0: ['physicist', 'education activist']}

{0: "Neil Turok is working on a model of the universe that explains the big bang -- while, closer to home, he's founded a network of math and science academies across Africa."}

2008-02-28

2008-03-20

TED2008

en

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

['Africa', 'TED Prize', 'education', 'math', 'physics', 'science', 'technology']

{156: 'How to educate leaders? Liberal arts', 59: 'My wish: Three actions for Africa', 233: 'My wish: Once Upon a School', 154: 'Why invest in Africa', 151: "Africa's cheetahs versus hippos", 6669: "How we can stop Africa's scientific brain drain"}

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

Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent's creative potential, we can create a change in Africa's future.

It was an incredible surprise to me to find out that there was actually an organization that cared about both parts of my life. Because, basically, I work as a theoretical physicist. I develop and test models of the Big Bang, using observational data. And I've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in Africa. And, I get a lot of flak for this at Cambridge. People wonder, you know, "How do you have time to do this?" And so on. And so it was simply astonishing to me to find an organization that actually appreciated both those sides. So I thought I'd start off by just telling you a little bit about myself and why I lead this schizophrenic life. Well, I was born in South Africa and my parents were imprisoned for resisting the racist regime. When they were released, we left and we went as refugees to Kenya and Tanzania. Both were very young countries then, and full of hope for the future. We had an amazing childhood. We didn't have any money, but we were outdoors most of the time. We had fantastic friends and we saw the wonders of the world, like Kilimanjaro, Serengeti and the Olduvai Gorge. Well, then we moved to London for high school. And after that — there's nothing much to say about that. It was rather dull. But I came back to Africa at the age of 17, as a volunteer teacher to Lesotho, which is a tiny country, surrounded at that time by apartheid South Africa. Well, 80 percent of the men in Lesotho worked in the mines over the border, in brutal conditions. Nevertheless, I — as I'm sure — as a rather irritating young, white man coming into their village, I was welcomed with incredible hospitality and warmth. But the kids were the best part. The kids were amazing: extremely eager and often very bright. And I'm just going to tell you one story, which got through to me. I used to try to take the kids outside as often as possible, to try to connect the academic stuff with the real world. And they weren't used to that. But I took them outside one day and I said, "I want you to estimate the height of the building." And I expected them to put a ruler next to the wall, size it up with a finger, and make an estimate of the height. But there was one little boy, very small for his age. He was the son of one of the poorest families in the village. And he wasn't doing that. He was scribbling with chalk on the pavement. And so, I said — I was annoyed — I said, "What are you doing? I want you to estimate the height of the building." He said, "OK. I measured the height of a brick. I counted the number of bricks and now I'm multiplying." Well — (Laughter) — I hadn't thought of that one. And many experiences like this happened to me. Another one is that I met a miner. He was home on his three-month leave from the mines. Sitting next to him one day, he said, "There's only one thing that I really loved at school. And you know what it was? Shakespeare." And he recited some to me. And these and many similar experiences convinced me that there are just tons of bright kids in Africa — inventive kids, intellectual kids — and starved of opportunity. And if Africa is going to get fixed, it's by them, not by us. Well, after — (Applause) — that's the truth. Well, after Lesotho, I traveled across Africa before returning to England — so gray and depressing, in comparison. And I went to Cambridge. And there, I fell for theoretical physics. Well, I'm not going to explain this equation, but theoretical physics is really an amazing subject. We can write down all the laws of physics we know in one line. And, admittedly, it's in a very shorthand notation. And it contains 18 free parameters, OK, which we have to fit to the data. So it's not the final story, but it's an incredibly powerful summary of everything we know about nature at the most basic level. And apart from a few very important loose ends, which you've heard about here — like dark energy and dark matter — this equation describes, seems to describe everything about the universe and what's in it. But there's one big puzzle remaining, and this was most succinctly put to me by my primary school math teacher in Tanzania, who's a wonderful Scottish lady who I still stay in touch with. And she's now in her 80s. And when I try to explain my work to her, she waved away all the details, and she said, "Neil, there's only one question that really matters. What banged?" (Laughter) "Everyone talks about the Big Bang. What banged?" And she's right. It's a question we've all been avoiding. The standard explanation is that the universe somehow sprang into existence, full of a strange kind of energy — inflationary energy — which blew it up. But the puzzle of why the universe emerged in that peculiar state is completely unsolved. Now, I worked on that theory for a while, with Stephen Hawking and others. But then I began to explore another alternative. The alternative is that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning. Perhaps the universe existed before the bang, and the bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe. Well, this possibility is actually suggested by the latest theories, the unified theories, which try to explain all those 18 free parameters in a single framework, which will hopefully predict all of them. And I'll just share a cartoon of this idea here. It's all I can convey. According to these theories, there are extra dimensions of space, not just the three we're familiar with, but at every point in the room there are more dimensions. And in particular, there's one rather strange one, in the most elegant unified theories we have. The strange one looks likes this: that we live in a three-dimensional world. We live in one of these worlds, and I can only show it as a sheet, but it's really three-dimensional. And a tiny distance away, there's another sheet, also three-dimensional, and they're separated by a gap. The gap is very tiny, and I've blown it up so you can see it. But it's really a tiny fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus. I won't go into the details of why we think the universe is like this, but it comes out of the math and trying to explain the physics that we know. Well, I got interested in this because it seemed to me that it was an obvious question. Which is, what happens if these two, three-dimensional worlds should actually collide? And if they collide, it would look a lot like the Big Bang. But it's slightly different than in the conventional picture. The conventional picture of the Big Bang is a point. Everything comes out of a point; you have infinite density. And all the equations break down. No hope of describing that. In this picture, you'll notice, the bang is extended. It's not a point. The density of matter is finite, and we have a chance of a consistent set of equations that can describe the whole process. So, to cut a long story short, we've explored this alternative. We've shown that it can fit all of the data that we have about the formation of galaxies, the fluctuations in the microwave background. Furthermore, there's an experimental way to tell this theory, apart from the inflationary explanation that I told you before. It involves gravitational waves. And in this scenario, not only was the Big Bang not the beginning, as you can see from the picture, it can happen over and over again. It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been bangs in the past, and there will be bangs in the future. And maybe we live in an endless universe. Well, making and testing models of the universe is, for me, the best way I have of enjoying and appreciating the universe. We need to make the best mathematical models we can, the most consistent ones. And then we scrutinize them, logically and with data. And we try to convince ourselves — we really try to convince ourselves they're wrong. That's progress: when we prove things wrong. And gradually, we hopefully move closer and closer to understanding the world. As I pursued my career, something was always gnawing away inside me. What about Africa? What about those kids I'd left behind? Instead of developing, as we'd all hoped in the '60s, things had gotten worse. Africa was gripped by poverty, disease and war. This is very graphically shown by the Worldmapper website and project. And so the idea is to represent each country on a map, but scale the area according to some quantity. So here's just the standard area map of the world. By the way, Africa is very large. And the next map now shows Africa's GDP in 1960, around the time of independence for many African states. Now, this is 1990, and then 2002. And here's a projection for 2015. Big changes are happening in the world, but they're not helping Africa. What about Africa's population? The population isn't out of proportion to its area, but Africa leads the world in deaths from often preventable causes: malnutrition, simple infections and birth complications. Then there's HIV/AIDS. And then there are deaths from war. OK, currently there are 45,000 people a month dying in the Congo, as a consequence of the war there over coltan and diamonds and other things. It's still going on. What about Africa's capacity to do something about these problems? Well, here's the number of physicians in Africa. Here's the number of people in higher education. And here — most shocking to me — the number of scientific research papers coming out of Africa. It just doesn't exist scientifically. And this was very eloquently argued at TED Africa: that all of the aid that's been given has completely failed to put Africa onto its own two feet. Well, the transition to democracy in South Africa in 1994 was literally a dream come true for many of us. My parents were both elected to the first parliament, alongside Nelson and Winnie Mandela. They were the only other couple. And in 2001, I took a research leave to visit them. And while I was busy working — I was working on these colliding worlds, in the day. But I learned that there was a desperate shortage of skills, especially mathematical skills, in industry, in government, in education. The ability to make and test models has become essential, not only to every single area of science today, but also to modern society itself. And if you don't have math, you're not going to enter the modern age. So I had an idea. And the idea was very simple. The idea was to set up an African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, or AIMS. And let's recruit students from the whole of Africa, bring them together with lecturers from all over the world, and we'll try to give them a fantastic education. Well, as a Cambridge professor, I had many contacts. And to my astonishment, they backed me 100 percent. They said, "Go and do it, and we'll come and lecture." And I knew it would be amazing fun to bring brilliant students from these countries — where they don't have any opportunities — together with the best lecturers in the world — who I knew would come, because of the interest in Africa — and put them together and just let the sparks fly. So we bought a derelict hotel near Cape Town. It's an 80-room Art Deco hotel from the 1920s. The area was kind of seedy, so we got an 80-room hotel for 100,000 dollars. It's a beautiful building. We decided we would refurbish it and then put out the word: we're going to start the best math institute in Africa in this hotel. Well, the new South Africa is a very exciting country. And those of you who haven't been there, you should go. It's very, very interesting what's happening. And we recruited wonderful staff, highly motivated staff. The other thing that's happened, which was good for us, is the Internet. Even though the Internet is very expensive all over Africa, there are Internet cafes everywhere. And bright young Africans are desperate to join the global community, to be successful — and they're very ambitious. They want to be the next Einstein. And so when word came out that AIMS was opening, it spread very quickly via e-mail and our website. And we got lots of applicants. Well, we designed AIMS as a 24-hour learning environment, and it was fantastic to start a university from the beginning. You have to rethink, what is the university for? And that's really exciting. So we designed it to have interactive teaching. No droning on at the chalkboard. We emphasize problem-solving, working in groups, every student discovering and maximizing their own potential and not chasing grades. Everyone lives together in this hotel — lecturers and students — and it's not surprising at all to find an impromptu tutorial at 1 a.m. The students don't usually leave the computer lab till 2 or 3 a.m. And then they're up again at eight in the morning. Lectures, problem-solving and so on. It's an extraordinary place. We especially emphasize areas of great relevance to Africa's development, because, in those areas, scientists working in Africa will have a competitive advantage. They'll publish, be invited to conferences. They'll do well. They'll have successful careers. And AIMS has done extremely well. Here is a list of last year's graduates, graduated in June, and what they're currently doing — 48 of them. And where they are is indicated over here. And where they've gone. So these are all postgraduate students. And they've all gone on to master's and Ph.D. degrees in excellent places. Five students can be educated at AIMS for the cost of educating one in the U.S. or Europe. But more important, the pan-African student body is a continual source of strength, pride and commitment to Africa. We illustrate AIMS' progress by coloring in the countries of Africa. So here you can see behind this list. When a county is colored yellow, we've received an application; orange, we've accepted an application; and green, a student has graduated. So here is where we were after the first graduation in 2004. And we set ourselves a goal of turning the continent green. So there's 2005, -6, -7, -8. (Applause) We're well on the way to achieving our initial goal. We had some of the students filmed at home before they came to AIMS. And I'll just show you one. Tendai Mugwagwa: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa. I have a Bachelor of Science with an education degree. I will be attending AIMS. My understanding of the course is that it covers quite a lot. You know, from physics to medicine, in particular, epidemiology and also mathematical modeling. Neil Turok: So Tendai came to AIMS and did very well. And I'll let her take it from there. TM: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa and I was a student at AIMS in 2003 and 2004. After leaving AIMS, I went on to do a master's in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. After that, I came to the Netherlands where I'm now doing a Ph.D. in theoretical immunology. Professor: Tendai is working very independently. She communicates well with the immunologists at the hospital. So all in all I have a very good Ph.D. student from South Africa. So I'm happy she's here. NT: Another student in the first year of AIMS was Shehu. And he's shown here with his favorite high school teacher. And then entering university in northern Nigeria. And after AIMS, Shehu wanted to do high-energy physics, and he came to Cambridge. He's about to finish his Ph.D., and he was filmed recently with someone you all know. Shehu: And from there we will be able to, hopefully, make better predictions and then we compare it to the graph and also make some predictions. Stephen Hawking: That is nice. NT: Here are the current students at AIMS. There are 53 of them from 20 different countries, including 20 women. So now I'm going to get to my TED business. Well, we had a party. This is Africa — we have good parties in Africa. And last month, they threw a surprise party for me. Here's somebody you've seen already. (Applause) I want to point out a few other exceptional people in this picture. So, we were having a party, as you can see they're completely eclipsing me at this point. This is Ezra. She's from Darfur. She's a physicist, and somehow stays smiling, in spite of everything going on back home. But she wants to continue in physics, and she's doing extremely well. This is Lydia. Lydia is the first ever woman to graduate in mathematics in the Central African Republic. And she's now at AIMS. (Applause) So now let me get to our TED wish. Well, it's not my TED wish; it's our wish, as you've already gathered. And our wish has two parts: one is a dream and the other's a plan. OK. Our TED dream is that the next Einstein will be African. (Applause) In striving for the heights of creative genius, we want to give thousands of people the motivation, the encouragement and the courage to obtain the high-level skills they need to help Africa. Among them will be not only brilliant scientists — I'm sure of that from what we've seen at AIMS — they'll also be the African Gates, Brins and Pages of the future. Well, I said we also have a plan. And our plan is quite simple. AIMS is now a proven model. And what we need to do is to replicate it. We want to roll out 15 AIMS centers in the next five years, all over Africa. Each will have a pan-African student body, but specialize in a different area of science. We want to use science to overcome the national and cultural barriers, as it does at AIMS. And we want to add elements to the curriculum. We want to add entrepreneurship and policy skills. The expanded AIMS will be a coherent pan-African institution, and its graduates will form a powerful network, working together for peace and progress across the continent. Over the last year, we've been visiting sites in Africa, looking at potential sites for new AIMS centers. And here are the ones we've selected. And each of these centers has a strong local team, each is in a beautiful place, an interesting place, which international lecturers will be happy to visit. And our partners across Africa are extremely enthusiastic about this. Everyone wants an AIMS center in their country. And last November, the conference of all the African ministers of science and technology, held in Mombasa, called for a comprehensive plan to roll out AIMS. So we have political support right across the continent. It won't be easy. At every site there will be huge challenges. Local scientists must play leading roles and governments must be persuaded to buy in. Conditions are very difficult, but we cannot afford to compromise on those principles which made AIMS work. And we summarize them this way: the institutes have got to be relevant, innovative, cost-effective and high quality. Why? Because we want Africa to be rich. Easy to remember the basic rules we need. So, just in ending, let me say the only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa's future. Over time, they will contribute to African development and to science in ways we can only imagine. Thank you. (Applause)

My green agenda for architecture

Norman Foster

{0: 'Norman Foster'}

{0: ['architect']}

{0: 'Lord Norman Foster, winner of the 1999 Pritzker Prize, is perhaps the leading urban stylist of our age. His elegant, efficient buildings grace cities around the globe.'}

2007-01-01

2008-03-24

DLD 2007

en

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

['architecture', 'cities', 'green', 'Best of the Web']

{104: 'Cradle to cradle design', 49: "Behind the design of Seattle's library", 359: 'The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture', 1854: 'Architecture at home in its community', 31: 'How architecture can connect us', 2092: 'How to reinvent the apartment building'}

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

Architect Norman Foster discusses his own work to show how computers can help architects design buildings that are green, beautiful and "basically pollution-free." From the 2007 DLD Conference, Munich; www.dld-conference.com

As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day. And I'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years — we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year — and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability. How far you can anticipate, what follows from it, what are the threats, what are the possibilities, the challenges, the opportunities? I think that — I've said in the past, many, many years ago, before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda, that it wasn't about fashion — it was about survival. But what I never said, and what I'm really going to make the point is, that really, green is cool. I mean, all the projects which have, in some way, been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life. I rarely actually quote anything, so I'm going to try and find a piece of paper if I can, [in] which somebody, at the end of last year, ventured the thought about what for that individual, as a kind of important observer, analyst, writer — a guy called Thomas Friedman, who wrote in the Herald Tribune, about 2006. He said, "I think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit Main Street. We reached a tipping point this year where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geo-political and competitive thing they could do. Hence my motto: green is the new red, white and blue." And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, "When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?" And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth. And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase. And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia. And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists. They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea. And at that period it was — in a way, a number of things were happening. Buckminster Fuller was the kind of green guru — again, a word that had not been coined. He was a design scientist, if you like, a poet, but he foresaw all the things that are happening now. It's another subject. It's another conversation. You can go back to his writings: it's quite extraordinary. It was at that time, with an awareness fired by Bucky's prophecies, his concerns as a citizen, as a kind of citizen of the planet, that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time. And it's a number of projects. I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands. And this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet Earth's sourcebook, and you had the hippie movement. And there are some of those qualities in this drawing, which seeks to sum up the recommendations. And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30-odd years later: wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells. And in parallel at that time, there was a very kind of exclusive design club. People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun. This is going back the mid-'50s, '60s. And despite Bucky's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style — access to comfort, to amenities — it was very, very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image, would be very, very stylishly packaged. And that, and more besides, would be in the palm of your hand. And I think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where, as the virtual world, which brings so many people together here, finally connects with the physical world, there is the reality that that has become humanized, so that digital world has all the friendliness, all the immediacy, the orientation of the analog world. Probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here, as we generously had gifted at lunchtime, the [unclear], which is a further kind of development — and again, inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel. A very, very beautiful object. So, something which in [the] '50s, '60s was very exclusive has now become, interestingly, quite inclusive. And the reference to the iPod as iconic, and in a way evocative of performance, delivery — quite interesting that [in] the beginning of the year 2007, the Financial Times commented that the Detroit companies envy the halo effect that Toyota has gained from the Prius as the hybrid, energy-conscious vehicle, which rivals the iPod as an iconic product. And I think it's very tempting to, in a way, seduce ourselves — as architects, or anybody involved with the design process — that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Buildings are important, but they're only a component of a much bigger picture. In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example. That would be the answer. Unfortunately, it's not the answer. It's only the beginning of the problem. You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit. For example, if, in that Bucky-inspired phrase, we draw back and we look at planet Earth, and we take a kind of typical, industrialized society, then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings, 44 percent, transport, 34 percent, and industry. But again, that only shows part of the picture. If you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport, in other words, the transport of people, which is 26 percent, then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together. So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part. For example, if you take, and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city, what I'll call, simplistically, a North American city — and Detroit is not a bad example, it is very car dependent. The city goes out in annular rings, consuming more and more green space, and more and more roads, and more and more energy in the transport of people between the city center — which again, the city center, as it becomes deprived of the living and just becomes commercial, again becomes dead. If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example — and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling — then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy. In other words, you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous. So basically, if you wanted to generalize, you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there, that the energy consumed reduces dramatically. Of course you can't separate this out from issues like social diversity, mass transit, the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance, the quality of civic spaces. But again, you can see Detroit, in yellow at the top, extraordinary consumption, down below Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities. In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened. You had for the first time mega-cities, [of] 5 million or more, which were occurring in the developing world. And now, out of typically 46 cities, 33 of those mega-cities are in the developing world. So you have to ask yourself — the environmental impact of, for example, China or India. If you take China, and you just take Beijing, you can see on that traffic system, and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles. In other words, if you put onto the roads, as is currently happening, 1,000 new cars every day — statistically, it's the biggest booming auto market in the world — and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing. And that urbanization is extraordinary, accelerated pace. So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years. In other words, it is accelerating by a factor of 10. And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled. If I pull back from that global picture, and I look at the implication over a similar period of time in terms of the technology — which, as a tool, is a tool for designers, and I cite our own experience as a company, and I just illustrate that by a small selection of projects — then how do you measure that change of technology? How does it affect the design of buildings? And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible? That story, in terms of buildings, started in the late '60s, early '70s. The one example I take is a corporate headquarters for a company called Willis and Faber, in a small market town in the northeast of England, commuting distance with London. And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space. In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky. So the humanistic ideal is very, very strong in all this work, encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here, where you can see greenery, you can see sunlight, you have a connection with nature. And nature is part of the generator, the driver for this building. And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow. It has facilities like swimming pools, it has flextime, it has a social heart, a space, you have contact with nature. Now this was 1973. In 2001, this building received an award. And the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time. And the people who'd created it came back: the project managers, the company chairmen then. And they were saying, you know, "The architects, Norman was always going on about designing for the future, and you know, it didn't seem to cost us any more. So we humored him, we kept him happy." The image at the top, what it doesn't — if you look at it in detail, really what it is saying is you can wire this building. This building was wired for change. So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters. And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors. And what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology. We were fortunate, because in a way our building was future-proofed. It anticipated change, even though those changes were not known. Round about that design period leading up to this building, I did a sketch, which we pulled out of the archive recently. And I was saying, and I wrote, "But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level." In other words, we didn't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building. And that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble — a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate, would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads. Notwithstanding the fact that the building, as a green building, is very much a pioneering building. And if I fast-forward in time, what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory. The library of the Free University, which opened last year, is an example of that. And again, the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality. And a combination of devices here, the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks, and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin, which enables the building to be ventilated, to consume dramatically less energy, and where it's really working with the forces of nature. And what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it. Again, coming back to that thing about the lifestyle, and in a way, the ecological agenda is very much at one with the spirit. So it's not a kind of sacrifice, quite the reverse. I think it's a great — it's a celebration. And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library. If I show another aspect of that technology then, in a completely different context — this apartment building in the Alps in Switzerland. Prefabricated from the most traditional of materials, but that material — because of the technology, the computing ability, the ability to prefabricate, make high-performance components out of timber — very much at the cutting edge. And just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology, the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit, to transfer that information now, directly into the factory. So if you cross the border — just across the border — a small factory in Germany, and here you can see the guy with his computer screen, and those points in space are communicated. And on the left are the cutting machines, which then, in the factory, enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very, very few millimeters, to be slotted together on site. And then interestingly, that building to then be clad in the oldest technology, which is the kind of hand-cut shingles. One quarter of a million of them applied by hand as the final finish. And again, the way in which that works as a building, for those of us who can enjoy the spaces, to live and visit there. If I made the leap into these new technologies, then how did we — what happened before that? I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted? Well, obviously the building still happened. I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here. And in the absence of computers, you have to physically model. So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky. For wind tunnels, we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air, and the many kilometers of cable and so on. And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer. And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport. This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal — big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery. And Stansted, the green alternative, which uses natural light, is a friendly place: you know where you are, you can relate to the outside. And for a large part of its cycle, not needing electric light — electric light, which in turn creates more heat, which creates more cooling loads and so on. And at that particular point in time, this was one of the few solitary computers. And that's a little image of the tree of Stansted. Not going back very far in time, 1990, that's our office. And if you looked very closely, you'd see that people were drawing with pencils, and they were pushing, you know, big rulers and triangles. It's not that long ago, 17 years, and here we are now. I mean, major transformation. Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk. Now, every week, we have the equivalent of 84 million disks, which record our archival information on past, current and future projects. That reaches 21 kilometers into the sky. This is the view you would get, if you looked down on that. But meanwhile, as you know, wonderful protagonists like Al Gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature, set in the context of that, interestingly, those buildings which are celebratory and very, very relevant to this place. Our Reichstag project, which has a very familiar agenda, I'm sure, as a public place where we sought to, in a way, through a process of advocacy, reinterpret the relationship between society and politicians, public space. And maybe its hidden agenda, an energy manifesto — something that would be free, completely free of fuel as we know it. So it would be totally renewable. And again, the humanistic sketch, the translation into the public space, but this very, very much a part of the ecology. But here, not having to model it for real. Obviously the wind tunnel had a place, but the ability now with the computer to explore, to plan, to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature: natural ventilation, to be able to model the chamber below, and to look at biomass. A combination of biomass, aquifers, burning vegetable oil — a process that, quite interestingly, was developed in Eastern Germany, at the time of its dependence on the Soviet Bloc. So really, retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean, it was virtually pollution-free. You can measure it again. You can compare how that building, in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year — at the time that we took that project, over 7,000 tons — what it would have been with natural gas and finally, with the vegetable oil, 450 tons. I mean, a 94 percent reduction — virtually clean. We can see the same processes at work in terms of the Commerce Bank — its dependence on natural ventilation, the way that you can model those gardens, the way they spiral around. But again, very much about the lifestyle, the quality — something that would be more enjoyable as a place to work. And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption. There is an evolution here between the projects, and Swiss Re again develops that a little bit further — the project in the city in London. And this sequence shows the buildup of that model. But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it. What are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site? If, for example, you seek to do a building which goes right to the edge of the pavement, it's the same amount of space. And finally, you profile this, you cut grooves into it. The grooves become the kind of green lungs which give views, which give light, ventilation, make the building fresher. And you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance, which is a mesh of triangulated structures — again, in a long connection evocative of some of those works of Buckminster Fuller, and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity. And here, if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria, the way in which now, with a computer, we can model the forces, we can see the high pressure, the low pressure, the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing. So it also has the ability, all the time, regardless of the direction of the wind, to be able to make the building fresh and efficient. And unlike conventional buildings, the top of the building is celebratory. It's a viewing place for people, not machinery. And the base of the building is again about public space. Comparing it with a typical building, what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking? And I'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project. It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying. The level is dropping, rather like the Aral Sea. And the Dead Sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it. So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea. And our translation of that, using a lot of the thinking built up over the 40 years, is to say, what if that, instead of being just a pipe, what if it is a lifeline? What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture? In other words, water is the lifeblood. And if you just go back to the previous image, and you look at this area of volatility and hostility, that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause, in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense. Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication. And whether that communication is the virtual world or it is the physical world, then it's absolutely central to society. And how do we make more legible in this growing world, especially in some of the places that I'm talking about — China, for example, which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports. Now what form do they take? How do you make them more friendly at that scale? Hong Kong I refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age, because you always have a point of reference. So what happens when we take that and you expand that further into the Chinese society? And what is interesting is that that produces in a way perhaps the ultimate mega-building. It is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment. 250 — excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days. Larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at Heathrow — built — plus the new, un-built Terminal Five. And the challenge here is a building that will be green, that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel, is about friendly, is coming back to that starting point, is very, very much about the lifestyle. And perhaps these, in the end, as celebratory spaces. As Hubert was talking over lunch, as we sort of engaged in conversation, talked about this, talked about cities. Hubert was saying, absolutely correctly, "These are the new cathedrals." And in a way, one aspect of this conversation was triggered on New Year's Eve, when I was talking about the Olympic agenda in China in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations. And I was voicing the thought that — it just crossed my mind that New Year's Eve, a sort of symbolic turning point as we move from 2006 to 2007 — that maybe, you know, the future was the most powerful, innovative sort of nation. The way in which somebody like Kennedy inspirationally could say, "We put a man on the moon." You know, who is going to say that we cracked this thing of the dependence on fossil fuels, with all that being held to ransom by rogue regimes, and so on. And that's a concerted platform. It's more than one device, you know, it's renewable. And I voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year, I thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other, larger countries out there — the Chinas, the Indias, the Asian-Pacific tigers. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A look inside the brain in real time

Christopher deCharms

{0: 'Christopher deCharms'}

{0: ['brain researcher']}

{0: 'Christopher deCharms is working on a way to use fMRI scans to show brain activity -- in real time. '}

2008-02-29

2008-03-24

TED2008

en

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

['biology', 'brain', 'business', 'demo', 'medicine', 'science', 'technology', 'visualizations']

{184: '3 clues to understanding your brain', 320: 'A computer that works like the brain', 125: 'How brain science will change computing', 2077: 'A neural portrait of the human mind', 1671: 'A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really.', 2244: "How to control someone else's arm with your brain"}

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

Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity -- thoughts, emotions, pain -- while it is happening. In other words, you can actually see how you feel.

Hi. I'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back, just the way I am — kind of a royal wave. You can mimic what you can see. You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm. Soon, you'll be able to look inside your brain and program, control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there. I'm going to tell you about that technology. People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years. Well, coming out of the research labs just now, for our generation, is the possibility to do that. People envision this as being very difficult. You had to take a spaceship, shrink it down, inject it into the bloodstream. It was terribly dangerous. (Laughter) You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries. But now, we have a real technology to do this. We're going to fly into my colleague Peter's brain. We're going to do it non-invasively using MRI. We don't have to inject anything. We don't need radiation. We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter's brain — literally, fly into his body — but more importantly, we can look into his mind. When Peter moves his arm, that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter's mind taking place. Now you've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms, that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains. What's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis. We've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds, and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he's inside the scanner. He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second. If he can see this pattern in his own brain, he can learn how to control it. There have been three ways to try to impact the brain: the therapist's couch, pills and the knife. This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have. We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you. If we can look at the activation in the brain that's producing the pain, we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information, and then we can select the areas that produce the pain. So put your arms back up and flex your bicep. Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing. What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain. They're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates. As they do it, in the upper left is a display that's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled. When they control their brain, they can control their pain. This is an investigational technology, but, in clinical trials, we're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients. This is not "The Matrix." You can only do this to yourself. You take control. I've seen inside my brain. You will too, soon. When you do, what do you want to control? You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself, all your experiences. These are some of the areas we're working on today that I don't have time to go into in detail. But I want to leave with you the big question. We are the first generation that's going to be able to enter into, using this technology, the human mind and brain. Where will we take it?

The call to learn

Clifford Stoll

{0: 'Clifford Stoll'}

{0: ['astronomer', 'educator', 'skeptic']}

{0: 'Astronomer Clifford Stoll helped to capture a notorious KGB hacker back in the infancy of the Internet. His agile mind continues to lead him down new paths -- from education and techno-skepticism to the making of zero-volume bottles.'}

2006-02-28

2008-03-26

TED2006

en

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

['culture', 'education', 'science', 'technology', 'web']

{66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 90: 'Unleash your creativity in a Fab Lab', 199: 'A performance of "Mathemagic"', 23801: 'What is color?', 23976: 'Light waves, visible and invisible', 23807: 'How we see color'}

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

Clifford Stoll captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides -- and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he's a scientist: "Once I do something, I want to do something else."

I'm delighted to be here. I'm honored by the invitation, and thanks. I would love to talk about stuff that I'm interested in, but unfortunately, I suspect that what I'm interested in won't interest many other people. First off, my badge says I'm an astronomer. I would love to talk about my astronomy, but I suspect that the number of people who are interested in radiative transfer in non-gray atmospheres and polarization of light in Jupiter's upper atmosphere are the number of people who'd fit in a bus shelter. So I'm not going to talk about that. (Laughter) It would be just as much fun to talk about some stuff that happened in 1986 and 1987, when a computer hacker is breaking into our systems over at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. And I caught the guys, and they turned out to be working for what was then the Soviet KGB, and stealing information and selling it. And I'd love to talk about that — and it'd be fun — but, 20 years later ... I find computer security, frankly, to be kind of boring. It's tedious. I'm — The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. A third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I do something else. So, I'm not going to talk about that. Nor am I going to talk about what I think are obvious statements from my first book, "Silicon Snake Oil," or my second book, nor am I going to talk about why I believe computers don't belong in schools. I feel that there's a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools. My idea is: no! No! Get them out of schools, and keep them out of schools. And I'd love to talk about this, but I think the argument is so obvious to anyone who's hung around a fourth grade classroom that it doesn't need much talking about — but I guess I may be very wrong about that, and everything else that I've said. So don't go back and read my dissertation. It probably has lies in it as well. Having said that, I outlined my talk about five minutes ago. (Laughter) And if you look at it over here, the main thing I wrote on my thumb was the future. I'm supposed to talk about the future, yes? Oh, right. And my feeling is, asking me to talk about the future is bizarre, because I've got gray hair, and so, it's kind of silly for me to talk about the future. In fact, I think that if you really want to know what the future's going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher. They know. In fact, don't ask just any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one. They're the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation. I don't. Nor, I suspect, do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring. Certainly, all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there. But to me, things aren't the future. What I ask myself is, what's society is going to be like, when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together? Change is happening, and the change that is happening is not one that is in software. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'd love to talk about it, it'd be fun, but I want to talk about what I'm doing now. What am I doing now? Oh — the other thing that I think I'd like to talk about is right over here. Right over here. Is that visible? What I'd like to talk about is one-sided things. I would dearly love to talk about things that have one side. Because I love Mobius loops. I not only love Mobius loops, but I'm one of the very few people, if not the only person in the world, that makes Klein bottles. Right away, I hope that all of your eyes glaze over. This is a Klein bottle. For those of you in the audience who know, you roll your eyes and say, yup, I know all about it. It's one sided. It's a bottle whose inside is its outside. It has zero volume. And it's non-orientable. It has wonderful properties. If you take two Mobius loops and sew their common edge together, you get one of these, and I make them out of glass. And I'd love to talk to you about this, but I don't have much in the way of ... things to say because — (Laughter) (Chris Anderson: I've got a cold.) However, the "D" in TED of course stands for design. Just two weeks ago I made — you know, I've been making small, medium and big Klein bottles for the trade. But what I've just made — and I'm delighted to show you, first time in public here. This is a Klein bottle wine bottle, which, although in four dimensions it shouldn't be able to hold any fluid at all, it's perfectly capable of doing so because our universe has only three spatial dimensions. And because our universe is only three spatial dimensions, it can hold fluids. So it's highly — that one's the cool one. That was a month of my life. But although I would love to talk about topology with you, I'm not going to. (Laughter) Instead, I'm going to mention my mom, who passed away last summer. Had collected photographs of me, as mothers will do. Could somebody put this guy up? And I looked over her album and she had collected a picture of me, standing — well, sitting — in 1969, in front of a bunch of dials. And I looked at it, and said, oh my god, that was me, when I was working at the electronic music studio! As a technician, repairing and maintaining the electronic music studio at SUNY Buffalo. And wow! Way back machine. And I said to myself, oh yeah! And it sent me back. Soon after that, I found in another picture that she had, a picture of me. This guy over here of course is me. This man is Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, who passed away this past August. Robert Moog was a generous, kind person, extraordinarily competent engineer. A musician who took time from his life to teach me, a sophomore, a freshman at SUNY Buffalo. He'd come up from Trumansburg to teach me not just about the Moog synthesizer, but we'd be sitting there — I'm studying physics at the time. This is 1969, 70, 71. We're studying physics, I'm studying physics, and he's saying, "That's a good thing to do. Don't get caught up in electronic music if you're doing physics." Mentoring me. He'd come up and spend hours and hours with me. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get into graduate school. In the background, my bicycle. I realize that this picture was taken at a friend's living room. Bob Moog came by and hauled a whole pile of equipment to show Greg Flint and I things about this. We sat around talking about Fourier transforms, Bessel functions, modulation transfer functions, stuff like this. Bob's passing this past summer has been a loss to all of us. Anyone who's a musician has been profoundly influenced by Robert Moog. (Applause) And I'll just say what I'm about to do. What I'm about to do — I hope you can recognize that there's a distorted sine wave, almost a triangular wave upon this Hewlett-Packard oscilloscope. Oh, cool. I can get to this place over here, right? Kids. Kids is what I'm going to talk about — is that okay? It says kids over here, that's what I'd like to talk about. I've decided that, for me at least, I don't have a big enough head. So I think locally and I act locally. I feel that the best way I can help out anything is to help out very, very locally. So Ph.D. this, and degree there, and the yadda yadda. I was talking about this stuff to some schoolteachers about a year ago. And one of them, several of them would come up to me and say, "Well, how come you ain't teaching?" And I said, "Well, I've taught graduate — I've had graduate students, I've taught undergraduate classes." No, they said, "If you're so into kids and all this stuff, how come you ain't over here on the front lines? Put your money where you mouth is." Is true. Is true. I teach eighth-grade science four days a week. Not just showing up every now and then. No, no, no, no, no. I take attendance. I take lunch hour. (Applause) This is not — no, no, no, this is not claps. I strongly suggest that this is a good thing for each of you to do. Not just show up to class every now and then. Teach a solid week. Okay, I'm teaching three-quarters time, but good enough. One of the things that I've done for my science students is to tell them, "Look, I'm going to teach you college-level physics. No calculus, I'll cut out that. You won't need to know trig. But you will need to know eighth-grade algebra, and we're going to do serious experiments. None of this open-to-chapter-seven-and-do-all-the-odd-problem-sets. We're going to be doing genuine physics." And that's one of the things I thought I'd do right now. (High-pitched tone) Oh, before I even turn that on, one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class — this is through the lens, and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light. My students in El Cerrito — with my help, of course, and with the help of a very beat up oscilloscope — measured the speed of light. We were off by 25 percent. How many eighth graders do you know of who have measured the speed of light? In addition to that, we've measured the speed of sound. I'd love to measure the speed of light here. I was all set to do it and I was thinking, "Aw man," I was just going to impose upon the powers that be, and measure the speed of light. And I'm all set to do it. I'm all set to do it, but then it turns out that to set up here, you have like 10 minutes to set up! And there's no time to do it. So, next time, maybe, I'll measure the speed of light! But meanwhile, let's measure the speed of sound! Well, the obvious way to measure the speed of sound is to bounce sound off something and look at the echo. But, probably — one of my students, Ariel [unclear], said, "Could we measure the speed of light using the wave equation?" And all of you know the wave equation is the frequency times the wavelength of any wave ... is a constant. When the frequency goes up, the wavelength comes down. Wavelength goes up, frequency goes down. So, if we have a wave here — over here, that's what's interesting — as the pitch goes up, things get closer, pitch goes down, things stretch out. Right? This is simple physics. All of you know this from eighth grade, remember? What they didn't tell you in physics — in eighth-grade physics — but they should have, and I wish they had, was that if you multiply the frequency times the wavelength of sound or light, you get a constant. And that constant is the speed of sound. So, in order to measure the speed of sound, all I've got to do is know its frequency. Well, that's easy. I've got a frequency counter right here. Set it up to around A, above A, above A. There's an A, more or less. Now, so I know the frequency. It's 1.76 kilohertz. I measure its wavelength. All I need now is to flip on another beam, and the bottom beam is me talking, right? So anytime I talk, you'd see it on the screen. I'll put it over here, and as I move this away from the source, you'll notice the spiral. The slinky moves. We're going through different nodes of the wave, coming out this way. Those of you who are physicists, I hear you rolling your eyes, but bear with me. (Laughter) To measure the wavelength, all I need to do is measure the distance from here — one full wave — over to here. From here to here is the wavelength of sound. So, I'll put a measuring tape here, measuring tape here, move it back over to here. I've moved the microphone 20 centimeters. 0.2 meters from here, back to here, 20 centimeters. OK, let's go back to Mr. Elmo. And we'll say the frequency is 1.76 kilohertz, or 1760. The wavelength was 0.2 meters. Let's figure out what this is. (Laughter) (Applause) 1.76 times 0.2 over here is 352 meters per second. If you look it up in the book, it's really 343. But, here with kludgy material, and lousy drink — we've been able to measure the speed of sound to — not bad. Pretty good. All of which comes to what I wanted to say. Go back to this picture of me a million years ago. It was 1971, the Vietnam War was going on, and I'm like, "Oh my God!" I'm studying physics: Landau, Lipschitz, Resnick and Halliday. I'm going home for a midterm. A riot's going on on campus. There's a riot! Hey, Elmo's done: off. There's a riot going on on campus, and the police are chasing me, right? I'm walking across campus. Cop comes and looks at me and says, "You! You're a student." Pulls out a gun. Goes boom! And a tear gas canister the size of a Pepsi can goes by my head. Whoosh! I get a breath of tear gas and I can't breathe. This cop comes after me with a rifle. He wants to clunk me over the head! I'm saying, "I got to clear out of here!" I go running across campus quick as I can. I duck into Hayes Hall. It's one of these bell-tower buildings. The cop's chasing me. Chasing me up the first floor, second floor, third floor. Chases me into this room. The entranceway to the bell tower. I slam the door behind me, climb up, go past this place where I see a pendulum ticking. And I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, the square root of the length is proportional to its period." (Laughter) I keep climbing up, go back. I go to a place where a dowel splits off. There's a clock, clock, clock, clock. The time's going backwards because I'm inside of it. I'm thinking of Lorenz contractions and Einsteinian relativity. I climb up, and there's this place, way in the back, that you climb up this wooden ladder. I pop up the top, and there's a cupola. A dome, one of these ten-foot domes. I'm looking out and I'm seeing the cops bashing students' heads, shooting tear gas, and watching students throwing bricks. And I'm asking, "What am I doing here? Why am I here?" Then I remember what my English teacher in high school said. Namely, that when they cast bells, they write inscriptions on them. So, I wipe the pigeon manure off one of the bells, and I look at it. I'm asking myself, "Why am I here?" So, at this time, I'd like to tell you the words inscribed upon the Hayes Hall tower bells: "All truth is one. In this light, may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind, from darkness to light, from narrowness to broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance. It is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn." Thank you very much.

The search for the true face of Leonardo

Siegfried Woldhek

{0: 'Siegfried Woldhek'}

{0: ['illustrator']}

{0: "Siegfried Woldhek knows faces -- he's drawn more than 1,100 of them. Using sophisticated image analysis and his own skills as an artist, he's come up with a fascinating discovery about Leonardo Da Vinci."}

2008-02-29

2008-04-01

TED2008

en

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

['art', 'demo', 'design', 'entertainment', 'history', 'technology']

{400: 'Tidying up art', 32: 'Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string', 267: 'Moving sculpture', 1588: 'The secret lives of paintings', 296: '"Mother of Pearl," "If I Had You"', 1325: 'The debut of the British Paraorchestra'}

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

Mona Lisa is one of the best-known faces on the planet. But would you recognize an image of Leonardo da Vinci? Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek uses some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo.

Good morning. Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. We're all familiar with his fantastic work — his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. But we do not know his face. Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians. So, what do you think? Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? Let's find out. Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. But no faces? I find that hard to believe. His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here — en face or three-quarters. So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. So let's try to find them. I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. There are about 120, you see them here. Which ones of these could be self-portraits? Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. So we can eliminate all the profiles. It also has to be sufficiently detailed. So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. (Laughter) And look what happens — only three candidates remain that fit the bill. And here they are. Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "The Musician." Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 — 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. (Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces. OK, now let's look at these three portraits. And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. Now, are they made in the right order? The young man should be made first. And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. They are made in the right order. What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made. So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? Well, we need a reference. And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces. Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published. It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. The icon of icons finally has a face. Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. (Applause)

Sputnik mania

David Hoffman

{0: 'David Hoffman'}

{0: ['filmmaker']}

{0: "In David Hoffman's long film career, he's made documentaries on everything from Amelia Earhardt to B.B. King, from double-dutch jump-roping to F-15 fighter pilots. Lately he's been fascinated with the early space program and our mania for all things Sputnik."}

2007-03-03

2008-04-02

TED2007

en

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

['education', 'history', 'math', 'science', 'space', 'technology', 'war']

{4: 'The real future of space exploration', 178: 'This is Saturn', 404: 'The design of the universe', 23955: 'Who won the space race?', 2650: "The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons", 344: 'How to survive a nuclear attack'}

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

Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.

Fifty years ago in the old Soviet Union, a team of engineers was secretly moving a large object through a desolate countryside. With it, they were hoping to capture the minds of people everywhere by being the first to conquer outer space. The rocket was huge. And packed in its nose was a silver ball with two radios inside. On October 4, 1957, they launched their rocket. One of the Russian scientists wrote at the time: "We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik. In the olden days, explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe. Now we have the good fortune to open up space. And it is for those in the future to envy us our joy." You're watching snippets from "Sputnik," my fifth documentary feature, which is just about completed. It tells the story of Sputnik, and the story of what happened to America as a result. For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space. But just three days later, on a day they called Red Monday, the media and the politicians told us, and we believed, that Sputnik was proof that our enemy had beaten us in science and technology, and that they could now attack us with hydrogen bombs, using their Sputnik rocket as an IBM missile. All hell broke loose. Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America — historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It provoked the missile gap. It exploded an arms race. It began the space race. Within a year, Congress funded huge weapons increases, and we went from 1,200 nuclear weapons to 20,000. And the reactions to Sputnik went far beyond weapons increases. For example, some here will remember this day, June 1958, the National Civil Defense Drill, where tens of millions of people in 78 cities went underground. Or the Gallup Poll that showed that seven in 10 Americans believed that a nuclear war would happen, and that at least 50 percent of our population was going to be killed. But Sputnik provoked wonderful changes as well. For example, some in this room went to school on scholarship because of Sputnik. Support for engineering, math and science — education in general — boomed. And Vint Cerf points out that Sputnik led directly to ARPA, and the Internet, and, of course, NASA. My feature documentary shows how a free society can be stampeded by those who know how to use media. But it also shows how we can turn what appears at first to be a bad situation, into something that was overall very good for America. "Sputnik" will soon be released. In closing, I would like to take a moment to thank one of my investors: longtime TEDster, Jay Walker. And I'd like to thank you all. (Applause). Thank you, Chris.

A new kind of music video

Jakob Trollback

{0: 'Jakob Trollback'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Jakob Trollback is a pioneering designer, whose work in video and motion graphics has helped define the industry -- always pushing the edges of technology and entertainment through design.'}

2007-03-03

2008-04-03

TED2007

en

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

['art', 'demo', 'design', 'entertainment', 'film', 'music', 'online video', 'visualizations', 'animation']

{144: "The Web's secret stories", 14: 'Software (as) art', 356: "Things I've learned in my life so far", 196: 'The music wars', 2345: "Home is a song I've always remembered", 1912: 'How I beat stage fright'}

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

What would a music video look like if it were directed by the music, purely as an expression of a great song, rather than driven by a filmmaker's concept? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form.

I’m working a lot with motion and animation, and also I'm an old DJ and a musician. So, music videos are something that I always found interesting, but they always seem to be so reactive. So I was thinking, can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it? So with two designers, Tolga and Christina, at my office, we took a track — many of you probably know it. It’s about 25 years old, and it's David Byrne and Brian Eno — and we did this little animation. And I think that it's maybe interesting, also, that it deals with two problematic issues, which are rising waters and religion. Song: Before God destroyed the people on the Earth, he warned Noah to build an Ark. And after Noah built his Ark, I believe he told Noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them. And when Noah had done built his Ark, I understand that somebody began to rend a song. And the song began to move on I understand like this. And when Noah had done built his Ark ... Move on ... In fact ... Concern ... So they get tired, has come dark and rain; they get weary and tired. And then he went and knocked an old lady house. And old lady ran to the door and say, "Who is it?" Jack say, "Me, Mama-san, could we spend the night here? Because we’re far from home, we’re very tired." And the old lady said, "Oh yes, come on in." It was come dark and rain, will make you weary and tired. (Applause)

Questioning the universe

Stephen Hawking

{0: 'Stephen Hawking'}

{0: ['theoretical physicist']}

{0: "Stephen Hawking's scientific investigations shed light on the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the ultimate fate of the universe. His bestselling books for a general audience have given an appreciation of physics to millions."}

2008-02-27

2008-04-04

TED2008

en

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

['String theory', 'evolution', 'math', 'physics', 'science', 'time', 'universe']

{47: 'Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars', 253: "CERN's supercollider", 98: 'Why the universe seems so strange', 1386: 'Questions no one knows the answers to', 23422: 'What is the universe expanding into?', 33931: 'Three ways the universe could end '}

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

In keeping with the theme of TED2008, professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe -- How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe. The questions I would like to talk about are: one, where did we come from? How did the universe come into being? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race? Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding. Distant galaxies were moving away from us. This meant they must have been closer together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. But was there anything before the Big Bang? If not, what created the universe? Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did? We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. And second, there was no question of the initial state of the universe. We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. However, this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions depends on time and space being separate and distinct. Under extreme conditions, general relativity and quantum theory allow time to behave like another dimension of space. This removes the distinction between time and space, and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state. The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing. Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background, which is an imprint of the very early universe. We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence. I now turn to the second big question: are we alone, or is there other life in the universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy. But we don't know how life first appeared. We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of a planet of Earth type. This suggests that the probability of life appearing is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the ten billion years available. On the other hand, we don't seem to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting the reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet. This brings me to the last of the big questions: the future of the human race. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. The answers to these big questions show that we have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I am in favor of manned — or should I say, personned — space flight. All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. I have been very lucky that my disability has not been a serious handicap. Indeed, it has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge. The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. Thank you for listening. Chris Anderson: Professor, if you had to guess either way, do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way, as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher? This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED. Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. The alternative is that civilizations don't last very long, but destroy themselves. CA: Professor Hawking, thank you for that answer. We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. Professor, we really thank you for the extraordinary effort you made to share your questions with us today. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

New thinking on 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'}

2008-03-03

2008-04-08

TED2008

en

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

['activism', 'climate change', 'global issues', 'science']

{128: 'Salvation (and profit) in greentech', 192: 'A critical look at geoengineering against climate change', 74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 1380: 'Why I must speak out about climate change', 535: 'What comes after An Inconvenient Truth?', 2784: 'A climate solution where all sides can win'}

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

In this brand-new slideshow (premiering on TED.com), Al Gore presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists recently predicted. He challenges us to act.

I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so — well it's — I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session. And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. How dare we be optimistic? Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word "behavior" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. And we have one. I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, "How do you do?" And she said, "You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore." (Laughter) Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war — strategic conflicts. And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources. Let me show you these slides here. I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. This is what's happened in the last 28 years. To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically — doesn't look quite the same size — but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice — vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. Already, around the Arctic Circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. "They were the best of times, they were the worst of times": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. They have exactly the same amount of carbon. But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, "How certain are you?" They wanted to answer that "99 percent." The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was "more than 90 percent." Now, the skeptics say, "Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun." If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. Here's the stratosphere: cooler. CSI: Climate. Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. What is missing is a sense of urgency. If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV — who did this pro bono — did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. This is the winner. NBC — I'll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. From laughs to tears — this is one of the older tobacco commercials. So here's what we're doing. This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. But it's not just the developed nations. The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia — over thirty years. This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. '70s. '80s. '90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. We have the technologies. We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. People say, "What's the solution?" Here it is. Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck — and some things have changed since the 19th century. In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis. But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called "supergrid" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries — high-voltage DC currents. This is not pie in the sky; this can be done. We need to do it for our own economy. The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation. You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. The only two countries that didn't ratify — and now there's only one. Australia had an election. And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this — which is good news. Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice — just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. We now have a culture of distraction. But we have a planetary emergency. And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. I wish I could find the words to convey this. This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. We have the capacity to do it. One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, "Oh, this is so terrible. What a burden we have." I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. Let's do that. Thank you very much. Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form — one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. That hurts. Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter) CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean, there's — are you excited by their plans on global warming? AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, "Clean Coal." Has anybody noticed that? Every single debate has been sponsored by "Clean Coal." "Now, even lower emissions!" The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. So they're saying the right things and they may — whichever of them is elected — may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — this — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. Have a moratorium — we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen. We need help. We need help. CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing? AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? Buckminster Fuller once wrote, "If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? How would I be?" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. We can change things, but we have to actively change. What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. And that's hard to — that's hard to create — but it is coming. There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." We have to go far, quickly. So we have to have a change in consciousness. A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge. CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED. AG: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Free or cheap Wii Remote hacks

Johnny Lee

{0: 'Johnny Lee'}

{0: ['human-computer interaction researcher']}

{0: 'Researcher Johnny Lee became a YouTube star with his demo of Wii Remote hacks -- bending the low-cost game piece to power an interactive whiteboard, a multitouch surface, a head-mounted display ...'}

2008-02-28

2008-04-11

TED2008

en

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

['business', 'demo', 'design', 'education', 'entertainment', 'gaming', 'hack', 'technology']

{129: "How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images", 131: 'Rethink the desktop with BumpTop', 361: 'Are games better than life?', 48847: 'What streaming means for the future of entertainment', 49735: 'The transformative power of video games', 685: 'The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology'}

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

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

So, as researchers, something that we often do is use immense resources to achieve certain capabilities, or achieve certain goals. And this is essential to the progress of science, or exploration of what is possible. But it creates this unfortunate situation where a tiny, tiny fraction of the world can actually participate in this exploration or can benefit from that technology. Something that motivates me, and gets me really excited about my research, is when I see simple opportunities to drastically change that distribution and make the technology accessible to a much wider percentage of the population. I'm going to show you two videos that have gotten a lot of attention that I think embody this philosophy. And they actually use the Nintendo Wii Remote. For those of you who aren't familiar with this device, it's a $40 video game controller. And it's mostly advertised for its motion-sensing capabilities: so you can swing a tennis racket, or hit a baseball bat. But what actually interests me a lot more is the fact that in the tip of each controller is a relatively high-performing infrared camera. And I'm going to show you two demos of why this is useful. So here, I have my computer set up with the projector, and I have a Wii Remote sitting on top of it. And, for example, if you're in a school that doesn't have a lot money, probably a lot of schools, or if you're in an office environment, and you want an interactive whiteboard, normally these cost about two to three thousand dollars. So I'm going to show you how to create one with a Wii Remote. Now, this requires another piece of hardware, which is this infrared pen. You can probably make this yourself for about five dollars with a quick trip to the Radio Shack. It's got a battery, a button and an infrared LED — you guys can't see it — but it turns on whenever I push the button. Now, what this means is that if I run this piece of software, the camera sees the infrared dot, and I can register the location of the camera pixels to the projector pixels. And now this is like an interactive whiteboard surface. (Applause) So for about $50 of hardware, you can have your own whiteboard. This is Adobe Photoshop. (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) The software for this I've actually put on my website and have let people download it for free. In the three months this project has been public, it's been downloaded over half a million times. So teachers and students all around the world are already using this. (Applause) Although it does do it for 50 dollars, there are some limitations of this approach. You get about 80 percent of the way there, for one percent of the cost. Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots, so this is actually a multi-touch, interactive whiteboard system as well. (Applause) For the second demo, I have this Wii Remote that's actually next to the TV. So it's pointing away from the display, rather than pointing at the display. And why this is interesting is that if you put on, say, a pair of safety glasses, that have two infrared dots in them, they are going to give the computer an approximation of your head location. And why this is interesting is I have this sort of application running on the computer monitor, which has a 3D room, with some targets floating in it. And you can see that it looks like a 3D room. kind of like a video game, it sort of looks 3D, but for the most part, the image looks pretty flat, and bound to the surface of the screen. But if we turn on head tracking — the computer can change the image that's on the screen and make it respond to the head movements. So let's switch back to that. (Laughter) (Applause) So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game-development community. (Laughter) Because this is about 10 dollars of additional hardware if you already have a Nintendo Wii. So I'm looking forward to seeing some games, and actually Louis Castle, that's him down there, last week announced that Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers, is releasing a game in May that has a little Easter egg feature for supporting this type of head tracking. And that's from less than five months from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) But actually, to me, what's almost more interesting than either of these two projects is how people actually found out about them. YouTube has really changed the way, or changed the speed, in which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world. I'm doing some research in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week, a million people had seen this work, and literally within days, engineers, teachers and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives of this work. So I hope to see more of that in the future, and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Inventing instruments that unlock new music

Tod Machover

{0: 'Tod Machover', 1: 'Dan Ellsey'}

{0: ['composer', 'inventor'], 1: ['musician']}

{0: "At MIT's Media Lab, Tod Machover creates boundary-breaking new music, often using new instruments and music technologies he has invented.", 1: 'Dan Ellsey uses Hyperscore music software and a custom-tuned musical "hyperinstrument" to write, perform and conduct his music, and to help others learn how to compose.'}

2008-03-03

2008-04-15

TED2008

en

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

['creativity', 'demo', 'design', 'entertainment', 'health care', 'live music', 'music', 'technology', 'writing']

{103: 'How to truly listen', 286: 'The transformative power of classical music', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 1526: 'The mad scientist of music', 1440: 'Music and emotion through time', 883: 'How architecture helped music evolve'}

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

Tod Machover of MIT's Media Lab is devoted to extending musical expression to everyone, from virtuosos to amateurs, and in the most diverse forms, from opera to video games. He and composer Dan Ellsey shed light on what's next.

The first idea I'd like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal. It means a lot to us. But music is even more powerful if you don't just listen to it, but you make it yourself. So, that's my first idea. And we all know about the Mozart effect — the idea that's been around for the last five to 10 years — that just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby [in utero], that it'll raise our IQ points 10, 20, 30 percent. Great idea, but it doesn't work at all. So, you can't just listen to music, you have to make it somehow. And I'd add to that, that it's not just making it, but everybody, each of us, everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way, and that's one of the main parts of my work. So, with the MIT Media Lab, for quite a while now, we've been engaged in a field called active music. What are all the possible ways that we can think of to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience, not just listening, but making music? And we started by making instruments for some of the world's greatest performers — we call these hyperinstruments — for Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Gabriel, Prince, orchestras, rock bands. Instruments where they're all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument, so the instrument knows how it's being played. And just by changing the interpretation and the feeling, I can turn my cello into a voice, or into a whole orchestra, or into something that nobody has ever heard before. When we started making these, I started thinking, why can't we make wonderful instruments like that for everybody, people who aren't fantastic Yo-Yo Mas or Princes? So, we've made a whole series of instruments. One of the largest collections is called the Brain Opera. It's a whole orchestra of about 100 instruments, all designed for anybody to play using natural skill. So, you can play a video game, drive through a piece of music, use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound, touch a special surface to make melodies, use your voice to make a whole aura. And when we make the Brain Opera, we invite the public to come in, to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the Brain Opera. We toured that for a long time. It is now permanently in Vienna, where we built a museum around it. And that led to something which you probably do know. Guitar Hero came out of our lab, and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the MIT Media Lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface, people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music, and playing it over and over and over again. So, the model works, but it's only the tip of the iceberg, because my second idea is that it's not enough just to want to make music in something like Guitar Hero. And music is very fun, but it's also transformative. It's very, very important. Music can change your life, more than almost anything. It can change the way you communicate with others, it can change your body, it can change your mind. So, we're trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like Guitar Hero. We are very involved in education. We have a long-term project called Toy Symphony, where we make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive, but for little kids, so the kids will fall in love with making music, want to spend their time doing it, and then will demand to know how it works, how to make more, how to create. So, we make squeezy instruments, like these Music Shapers that measure the electricity in your fingers, Beatbugs that let you tap in rhythms — they gather your rhythm, and like hot potato, you send your rhythm to your friends, who then have to imitate or respond to what your doing — and a software package called Hyperscore, which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music. Extremely easy to use, but once you use it, you can go quite deep — music in any style. And then, by pressing a button, it turns into music notation so that live musicians can play your pieces. We've had good enough, really, very powerful effects with kids around the world, and now people of all ages, using Hyperscore. So, we've gotten more and more interested in using these kinds of creative activities in a much broader context, for all kinds of people who don't usually have the opportunity to make music. So, one of the growing fields that we're working on at the Media Lab right now is music, mind and health. A lot of you have probably seen Oliver Sacks' wonderful new book called "Musicophilia". It's on sale in the bookstore. It's a great book. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. He's a pianist himself, and he details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples' lives in unusual situations. So we know, for instance, that music is almost always the last thing that people with advanced Alzheimer's can still respond to. Maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones, you can find somebody who can't recognize their face in the mirror, or can't tell anyone in their family, but you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of the chair and start singing. And with that you can bring back parts of people's memories and personalities. Music is the best way to restore speech to people who have lost it through strokes, movement to people with Parkinson's disease. It's very powerful for depression, schizophrenia, many, many things. So, we're working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities which will let music really improve people's health. And we do this in many ways. We work with many different hospitals. One of them is right near Boston, called Tewksbury Hospital. It's a long-term state hospital, where several years ago we started working with Hyperscore and patients with physical and mental disabilities. This has become a central part of the treatment at Tewksbury hospital, so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities. It's the activity that seems to accelerate people's treatment the most and it also brings the entire hospital together as a kind of musical community. I wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before I go on. Video: They're manipulating each other's rhythms. It's a real experience, not only to learn how to play and listen to rhythms, but to train your musical memory and playing music in a group. To get their hands on music, to shape it themselves, change it, to experiment with it, to make their own music. So Hyperscore lets you start from scratch very quickly. Everybody can experience music in a profound way, we just have to make different tools. The third idea I want to share with you is that music, paradoxically, I think even more than words, is one of the very best ways we have of showing who we really are. I love giving talks, although strangely I feel more nervous giving talks than playing music. If I were here playing cello, or playing on a synth, or sharing my music with you, I'd be able to show things about myself that I can't tell you in words, more personal things, perhaps deeper things. I think that's true for many of us, and I want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have, from ourselves to the outside world. The first is a really crazy project that we're building right now, called Death and the Powers. And it's a big opera, one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now. And it's about a man, rich, successful, powerful, who wants to live forever. So, he figures out a way to download himself into his environment, actually into a series of books. So this guy wants to live forever, he downloads himself into his environment. The main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character. It becomes his legacy. And the opera is about what we can share, what we can pass on to others, to the people we love, and what we can't. Every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument, like this chandelier. It takes up the whole stage. It looks like a chandelier, but it's actually a robotic music instrument. So, as you can see in this prototype, gigantic piano strings, each string is controlled with a little robotic element — either little bows that stroke the strings, propellers that tickle the strings, acoustic signals that vibrate the strings. We also have an army of robots on stage. These robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character, Simon Powers, and his family. There are a whole series of them, kind of like a Greek chorus. They observe the action. We've designed these square robots that we're testing right now at MIT called OperaBots. These OperaBots follow my music. They follow the characters. They're smart enough, we hope, not to bump into each other. They go off on their own. And then they can also, when you snap, line up exactly the way you'd like to. Even though they're cubes, they actually have a lot of personality. The largest set piece in the opera is called The System. It's a series of books. Every single book is robotic, so they all move, they all make sound, and when you put them all together, they turn into these walls, which have the gesture and the personality of Simon Powers. So he's disappeared, but the whole physical environment becomes this person. This is how he's chosen to represent himself. The books also have high-packed LEDs on the spines. So it's all display. And here's the great baritone James Maddalena as he enters The System. This is a sneak preview. This premieres in Monaco — it's in September 2009. If by any chance you can't make it, another idea with this project — here's this guy building his legacy through this very unusual form, through music and through the environment. But we're also making this available both online and in public spaces, as a way of each of us to use music and images from our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love. So instead of being grand opera, this opera will turn into what we're thinking of as personal opera. And, if you're going to make a personal opera, what about a personal instrument? Everything I've shown you so far — whether it's a hyper-cello for Yo-Yo Ma or squeezy toy for a child — the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person: a virtuoso, a child. But what if I could make an instrument that could be adapted to the way I personally behave, to the way my hands work, to what I do very skillfully, perhaps, to what I don't do so skillfully? I think that this is the future of interface, it's the future of music, the future of instruments. And I'd like now to invite two very special people on the stage, so that I can give you an example of what personal instruments might be like. So, can you give a hand to Adam Boulanger, Ph.D. student from the MIT Media Lab, and Dan Ellsey. Dan, thanks to TED and to Bombardier Flexjet, Dan is here with us today all the way from Tewksbury. He's a resident at Tewksbury Hospital. This is by far the farthest he's strayed from Tewksbury Hospital, I can tell you that, because he's motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music. So, first of all, Dan, do you want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are? Dan Ellsey: Hello. My name is Dan Ellsey. I am 34 years old and I have cerebral palsy. I have always loved music and I am excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software. Tod Machover: And we're really excited to have you here, really Dan. (Applause) So we met Dan about three years ago, three and a half years ago, when we started working at Tewksbury. Everybody we met there was fantastic, did fantastic music. Dan had never made music before, and it turned out he was really fantastic at it. He's a born composer. He's very shy, too. So, turned out he's a fantastic composer, and over the last few years has been a constant collaborator of ours. He has made many, many pieces. He makes his own CDs. Actually, he is quite well known in the Boston area — mentors people at the hospital and children, locally, in how to make their own music. And I'll let Adam tell you. So, Adam is a Ph.D. student at MIT, an expert in music technology and medicine. And Adam and Dan have become close collaborators. What Adam's been working on for this last period is not only how to have Dan be able easily to make his own pieces, but how he can perform his piece using this kind of personal instrument. So, you want to say a little bit about how you guys work? Adam Boulanger: Yes. So, Tod and I entered into a discussion following the Tewksbury work and it was really about how Dan is an expressive person, and he's an intelligent and creative person. And it's in his face, it's in his breathing, it's in his eyes. How come he can't perform one of his pieces of music? That's our responsibility, and it doesn't make sense. So we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance, with precision, with control, and despite his physical disability, to be able to do that, to be able to perform his piece of music. So, the process and the technology — basically, first we needed an engineering solution. So, you know, we have a FireWire camera, it looked at an infrared pointer. We went with the type of gesture metaphor that Dan was already used to with his speaking controller. And this was actually the least interesting part of the work, you know, the design process. We needed an input; we needed continuous tracking; in the software, we look at the types of shapes he's making. But, then was the really interesting aspect of the work, following the engineering part, where, basically, we're coding over Dan's shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out, you know, how does Dan move? What's useful to him as an expressive motion? You know, what's his metaphor for performance? What types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music? So all the parameter fitting, and really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just Dan. And, you know, I think this is a perspective shift. It's not that our technologies — they provide access, they allow us to create pieces of creative work. But what about expression? What about that moment when an artist delivers that piece of work? You know, do our technologies allow us to express? Do they provide structure for us to do that? And, you know, that's a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological sphere. So, you know, with Dan, we needed a new design process, a new engineering process to sort of discover his movement and his path to expression that allow him to perform. And so that's what we'll do today. TM: So let's do it. So Dan do you want to tell everyone about what you're going to play now? DE: This is "My Eagle Song." TM: So Dan is going to play a piece of his, called "My Eagle Song". In fact, this is the score for Dan's piece, completely composed by Dan in Hyperscore. So he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into Hyperscore. He's incredibly fast at it, too, faster than I am, in fact. (Laughter) TM: He's really modest, too. So he can go in Hyperscore. You start out by making melodies and rhythms. He can place those exactly where he wants. Each one gets a color. He goes back into the composition window, draws the lines, places everything the way he wants to. Looking at the Hyperscore, you can see it also, you can see where the sections are, something might continue for a while, change, get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end. So that's the way he made his piece, and as Adam says, we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece. It's going to be looked at by this camera, analyze his movements, it's going to let Dan bring out all the different aspects of his music that he wants to. And you're also going to notice a visual on the screen. We asked one of our students to look at what the camera is measuring. But instead of making it very literal, showing you exactly the camera tracing, we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement, and shows the way it's being analyzed. I think it gives an understanding of how we're picking out movement from what Dan's doing, but I think it will also show you, if you look at that movement, that when Dan makes music, his motions are very purposeful, very precise, very disciplined and they're also very beautiful. So, in hearing this piece, as I mentioned before, the most important thing is the music's great, and it'll show you who Dan is. So, are we ready Adam? AB: Yeah. TM: OK, now Dan will play his piece "My Eagle Song" for you. (Applause) TM: Bravo. (Applause)

The new open-source economics

Yochai Benkler

{0: 'Yochai Benkler'}

{0: ['legal expert']}

{0: 'Yochai Benkler has been called "the leading intellectual of the information age." He proposes that volunteer-based projects such as Wikipedia and Linux are the next stage of human organization and economic production.'}

2005-07-07

2008-04-16

TEDGlobal 2005

en

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

['Google', 'business', 'collaboration', 'economics', 'law', 'social change', 'technology', 'wikipedia']

{63: 'The era of open innovation', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 274: 'Institutions vs. collaboration', 1656: 'A new kind of job market', 1938: 'How data will transform business', 410: 'Life in Second Life'}

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

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change. And so, to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in New York City. And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today. By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing — starting what was experienced as a mass—circulation daily paper — would come to cost two and a half million dollars. 10,000, two and a half million, 15 years. That's the critical change that is being inverted by the Net. And that's what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production. Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers — who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization — and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce. Now, the term "information society," "information economy," for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the industrial revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. It's just been industrial, which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars, and later, more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years. Now, let me tell you a different story. Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer — the NEC Earth Simulator — taking the primary from the U.S., and about two years later — this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating-point operations per second that the computer's capable of running — sigh of relief: IBM [Blue Gene] has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there's another supercomputer running in the world — SETI@home. Four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes. What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive — that there's less money that's required — but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these, or something rather like it — a computer. They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person — and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet. What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important means, the most important components of the core economic activities — remember, we are in an information economy — of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the industrial revolution. So we've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we've got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience — the other major experience, the other major input — which unlike simple labor — stand here turning this lever all day long — is not something that's the same or fungible among people. Any one of you who has taken someone else's job, or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. In that we're unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine. What's the effect of this? So, the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software. This is market share of Apache Web server — one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said, "Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!" One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what — well, we're gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft. Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people, who didn't control anything that they produced, acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right? But, in fact, of course, the story is it's the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site — 70 percent of a critical application on which Web-based communications and applications work is produced in this form, in direct competition with Microsoft. Not in a side issue — in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the Net. Software has done this in a way that's been very visible, because it's measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the Web. So, NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping, and they said, instead of having three or four fully trained Ph.D.s doing this all the time, let's break it up into small components, put it up on the Web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend five minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After six months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, "practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained Ph.D.," once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average. Now, if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to — well, not so little, medium little — tries to do research on Barbie. And she'll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias. This is what you'll find out about Barbie. This is it, there's nothing more to the definition, including, "manufacturers" — plural — "now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie." Which is vastly better than what you'll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is Barbie, Klaus. (Laughter) On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they'll find a genuine article — and I won't talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here — but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she's a good role model, etc. Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced. The claim to fame of Yahoo! was, we hire people to look — originally, not anymore — we hire people to look at websites and tell you — if they're in the index, they're good. This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the Open Directory Project, each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about, to say, this is good. So, this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, it's free for anyone to use and it's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting. This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing — the decision about what's relevant — to the community of the Web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do: so, page rank. The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers, or our people saying which is the most relevant, we're going to go out and count what you, people out there on the Web, for whatever reason — vanity, pleasure — produced links, and tied to each other. We're going to count those, and count them up. And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won't find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based mechanism: whoever pays the most is highest on the list. So, all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials — our PCs — we share them together. We also see this in wireless. It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property. What we're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we're developing algorithms to let people own machines, like Wi-Fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I'm listening, when I'm not using, I can help you transfer your messages; and when you're not using, you'll help me transfer yours. And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security. If in 1999 I told you, let's build a data storage and retrieval system. It's got to store terabytes. It's got to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's got to be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100 million users at any given moment. It's got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You'd say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I'm describing is P2P file sharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it's a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something. So, essentially what we're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market — or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society. That was not about society itself. That was, in fact, economic. But what we're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it's the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It's that it's the first time that it's having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don't have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It's open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it's not the only one. Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market: information flows to decide what are interesting problems; who's available and good for something; motivation structures — remember, money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter) It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular, what we've seen is task organization. You have to hire people who know what they're doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I'll spend just because it's interesting. Just because it's fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations. So, a new social phenomenon is emerging. It's creating, and it's most visible when we see it as a new form of competition. Peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry; free and open source software taking market share from Microsoft; Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms; Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias. But it's also a new source of opportunities for businesses. As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. Instead of building well-behaved appliances — things that you know what they'll do in advance — you begin to build more open tools. There's a new set of values, a new set of things people value. You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Like Wikipedia, like the Open Directory Project, you're beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right? You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings. That'll give me something I can use, and I'm going to contract with someone. I will deliver something based on what happens. It's very scary — that's what Google does, essentially. That's what IBM does in software services, and they've done reasonably well. So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long-term shift caused by the Internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some contexts, it's even more efficient because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It's sustainable and growing fast. But — and this is the dark lining — it is threatened by — in the same way that it threatens — the incumbent industrial systems. So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced. Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model, and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. Thank you.

World-class health care

Ernest Madu

{0: 'Ernest Madu'}

{0: ['cardiologist']}

{0: 'Ernest Madu founded the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, a revolutionary clinic for cardiovascular diseases in Kingston, Jamaica -- revolutionary for offering first-class health care in a developing nation. His next stop: Nigeria.'}

2007-06-06

2008-04-17

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'activism', 'global issues', 'health', 'health care', 'heart health', 'public health', 'science', 'global development']

{85: 'My wish: Rebuilding Rwanda', 268: 'A hospital tour in Nigeria', 156: 'How to educate leaders? Liberal arts', 1711: 'Health care should be a team sport', 24922: 'Why the hospital of the future will be your own home', 2076: 'What makes us get sick? Look upstream'}

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

Dr. Ernest Madu runs the Heart Institute of the Caribbean in Kingston, Jamaica, where he proves that -- with careful design, smart technical choices, and a true desire to serve -- it's possible to offer world-class healthcare in the developing world.

It is interesting that in the United States, the most significant health-care budget goes to cardiovascular disease care, whether it's private or public. There's no comparison at all. In Africa — where it is a major killer — it is totally ignored. And that situation cannot be right. We must do something about it. A health status of a nation parallels development of that nation. 17 million people die every year from heart disease. 32 million heart attacks and strokes occur. Most of this is in developing countries, and the majority is in Africa. 85 percent of global disease burden for cardiovascular disease is in developing countries — not in the West — and yet 90 percent of the resources are in the West. Who is at risk? People like you. It's not just the Africans that should be concerned about that. All friends of Africa, that will have reason to be in Africa at some point in time, should be very concerned about this deplorable situation. Has anyone here wondered what will happen if you go back to your room at night, and you start getting chest pains, shortness of breath, sweating? You're having a heart attack. What are you going to do? Will you fly back to the U.S., Germany, Europe? No, you will die. 50 percent will die within 24 hours, if not treated. This is what's going on. In a look at the map of the U.S. — the graph here, 10 million people here, 10 million here. By the time you get to 50, it's almost no one left in Nigeria — life expectancy is 47. It's not because some people don't survive childhood illnesses — they do — but they do not survive after the time that they reach about 45 years old and 50 years old. And those are the times they're most productive. Those are the times that they should be contributing to Africa's development. But they're not there. The best way to spiral into a cycle of poverty is to kill the parents. If you cannot secure the parents, you cannot guarantee the security of the African child. What are the risk factors? It's very well known. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on those. These are just for information: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise. The usual suspects. Right here in Tanzania, 30 percent of individuals have hypertension. 20 percent are getting treated. Only less than one percent are adequately treated. If we can treat hypertension alone in Africa, we'll save 250,000 lives a year. That's quite significant! Easy to treat. Look at the situation in Mauritius. In eight short years — we're here talking about HIV, malaria, which is all good. We cannot make the mistakes we've made with malaria and HIV. In eight short years, non-communicable diseases will become the leading causes of death in Africa. That is something to keep in mind. We can't deal with it with situations like this. This is a typical African hospital. We can't depend on the elites — they go to USA, Germany, U.K. for treatment. Unbelievable. You can't depend on foreign aid alone. Here is the situation: countries are turning inwards. Post-9/11, [the] United States has had a lot of trouble to deal with, their own internal issues. So, they spend their money trying to fix those problems. You can't rightly — it's not their responsibility, it is my responsibility. I have to take care of my own problems. If they help, that's good! But that is not my expectation. These worsening indices of health care or health studies in Africa demand a new look. We cannot keep on doing things the way we've always done them. If they have not worked, we have to look for alternative solutions. I'm here to talk to you about solutions. This has been — what has been a difficult sign to some of us. Several years ago, we started thinking about it. Everyone knows the problem. No one knows what the solutions are. We decided that we needed to put our money where our mouth is. Everyone is ready to throw in money, in terms of free money aid to developing countries. Talk about sustainable investment, no one is interested. You can't raise money. I have done businesses in healthcare in the United States — I live in Nashville, Tennessee, health care capital of America. [It's] very easy to raise money for health-care ventures. But start telling them, you know, we're going to try to do it in Nigeria — everyone runs away. That is totally wrong. Those of you in the audience here, if you want to help Africa, invest money in sustainable development. Let me lead you through a day in the life of the Heart Institute, so you get a glimpse of what we do, and I'll talk a little bit more about it. What we have done is to show that high-quality health care, comparable to the best anywhere in the world, can be done in a developing country environment. We have 25 positions right now — all of them trained, board certified in the USA, Canada or Britain. We have every modality that can be done in Vanderbilt, Cleveland Clinic — everywhere in the U.S. — and we do it for about 10 percent of the cost that you will need to do those things in the United States. (Applause) Additionally, we have a policy that no one is ever turned away because of ability to pay. We take care of everyone. (Applause) Whether you have one dollar, two dollars — it doesn't matter. And I will tell you how we're able to do it. We make sure that we select our equipment properly. We go for modular units. Units that have multi-modality functions have modular components. Easy to repair, and because of that, we do not take things that are not durable and cannot last. We emphasize training, and we make sure that this process is regenerative. Very soon we will all be dead and gone, but the problems will stay, unless we have people taking over from where we stopped. We made sure that we produced some things ourselves. We do not buy unit doses of radiopharmaceuticals. We get the generators from the companies. We manufacture them in-house, ourselves. That keeps the costs down. So, for a radiopharmaceutical in the U.S. — that you'll get a unit dose for 250 dollars — when we're finished manufacturing it in-house, we come at a price of about two dollars. (Applause) We recognize that the only way to bridge the gap between the rich and poor countries is through education and technology. All these problems we're talking about — if we bring development, they will all disappear. Technology is a great equalizer. How do we make it work? It's been proved: self-care is cost-effective. It extends opportunity to the rural centers, and we can use expertise in a very smart way. This is the way our centers are set up. We currently have three locations in the Caribbean, and we're planning a fourth one. And we have now decided to go into Africa. We will be doing the West African Heart Institute in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. That project will be starting within the next few months. We hope to open in 2008-09. And we will do other centers. This model can be adapted to every disease process. All the units, all the centers, are linked through a switched hub to a central server, and all the images are populated to review stations. And we designed this telemedicine solution. It's proprietary to us, and we are happy to share what we have learned with anyone who is interested in doing it. You can still be profitable. We make sure that the telemedicine platform gives access to expert medical specialists anywhere in the world, just by a click of the button. I'll lead you through, to see how this happens. This is at the Heart Institute. The doctors from anywhere can log in. I can call you in Switzerland and say, "Listen, go into our system. Look at Mrs. Jones. Look at the study, tell me what you think." They'll give me that information, and we'll make the care of the patient better. The patient doesn't have to travel. He doesn't have to experience the anxiety of not knowing because of limited expertise. We also use [an] electronic medical record system. I'm happy to say that the things we have implemented — 80 percent of U.S. practices do not have them, and yet the technology is there. But you know, they have that luxury. Because if you can't get it in Nashville, you can travel to Birmingham, two hours away, and you'll get it. If you can't get it in Cleveland, you can go to Cincinnati. We don't have that luxury, so we have to make it happen. When we do it, we will put the cost of care down. And we'll extend it to the rural centers and make it affordable. And everyone will get the care they deserve. It cannot just be technology, we recognize that. Prevention must be part of the solution — we emphasize that. But, you know, you have to tell people what can be done. It's not possible to tell people to do what is going to be expensive, and they go home and can't do it. They need to be alive, they need to feed. We recommend exercise as the most effective, simple, easy thing to do. We have had walks every year — every March, April. We form people into groups and make them go into challenges. Which group loses the most weight, we give them prizes. Which groups record more walking distance by pedometer, we give them prizes. We do this constantly. We encourage them to bring children. That way we start exposing the children from very early on, on what these issues are. Because once they learn it, they will stay with it. In doing this we have created at least 100 skilled jobs in Jamaica alone, and these are physicians with expertise and special training. We have taken care of over 1,000 indigent patients that could have died, including four free pacemakers in patients with complete heart block. For those that understand cardiology, complete heart block means certain death. If you don't get this pacemaker, you will be dead. So we are pleased with that. Indirectly, we have saved the government of Jamaica five million dollars from people that would have gone to Miami or Atlanta for care. And we've hopefully saved a lot of lives. By the end of this year, we would have contributed over one million dollars in indigent care. In the first four months, it's been 340,000 dollars, averaging 85,000 dollars a month. The government will not do that, because they have competing needs. They need to put resources elsewhere. But we can still do it. People say, "How can you do that?" This is how we can do that. At least 4,000 rich Jamaicans that were heading to Miami for treatment have self-confessed that they did not go to Miami because of the Heart Institute of the Caribbean. And, if they went to Miami, they will spend significantly more — eight to 10 times more. And they feel happy spending it at home, getting the same quality of care. And for that money — for every one patient that has the money to pay, it gives us an opportunity to take care of at least four people that do not have the resources to pay. (Applause) For this to work, this progress must be sustainable. So, we emphasize training. Training is critical. We have gone further: we have formed a relationship with the University of Technology, Jamaica, where I now have an appointment. And we are starting a biomedical engineering program, so that we will train people locally, who can repair that equipment. That way we're not going to deal with obsolescence and all those kinds of issues. We're also starting ancillary health-care technology training programs — training people in echocardiography, cardiac ultrasound, those kinds of things. Now, with that kind of training, it gives people motivation. Because now they will get a bachelors degree in medical imaging and all that kind of stuff. In the process, I want you to just hear from the trainees themselves what it has meant for them. (Video) Dr. Jason Topping: My name is Jason Topping. I'm a senior resident in anesthesia in intensive care at the University Hospital of the West Indies. I came to the Heart Institute in 2006, as part of my elective in my anesthesia and intensive care program. I spent three months at the Heart Institute. There's been no doubt around my colleagues about the utility of the training I received here, and I think there's been an increased interest now in — particularly in echocardiography and its use in our setting. Sharon Lazarus: I am an echocardiographer at the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, since the past two years. I received training at this institution. I think this aspect of training in cardiology that the Heart Institute of the Caribbean has introduced in Jamaica is very important in terms of diagnosing cardiac diseases. Ernest Madu: The lesson in this is that it can be done, and it can be sustained, and you can make it possible for everyone. Who are we to decide that poor people cannot get the best care? When have you been appointed to play God? It is not my decision. My job is to make sure that every person, no matter what fate has assigned to you, will have the opportunity to get the best quality health care in life. Next stop is West African Heart Institute, that we are going to be doing in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, as I said before. We will do other centers across West Africa. We will extend the same system into other areas, like dialysis treatment. And anyone who is interested in doing it in any health care situation, we will be happy to assist you and tell you how we've done it, and how you can do it. If we do this, we can change the face of health care in Africa. Africa has been good to us; it is time for us to give back to Africa. I am going. Those who want to come, I welcome you to come along with me. Thank you. (Applause)

Where does creativity hide?

Amy Tan

{0: 'Amy Tan'}

{0: ['novelist']}

{0: "Amy Tan is the author of such beloved books as <em>The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife</em> and <em>The Hundred Secret Senses.</em>"}

2008-02-02

2008-04-22

TED2008

en

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

['culture', 'entertainment', 'storytelling', 'writing']

{204: 'Tales of passion', 182: 'The illustrated woman', 396: 'Fashion and creativity', 1126: 'On being wrong', 1983: 'Success, failure and the drive to keep creating', 917: 'The politics of fiction'}

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

Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, looking for hints of how hers evolved.

The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (Laughter) OK. So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually — the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares. Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk — van Gogh syndrome — that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody — I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't — I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different. I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. And I had a miniature poodle. And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words. Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure. But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses — she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. There was a reason for everything. And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. You become very creative, in a survival sense. And this, then, led to my big questions. And they're the same ones that I have today. And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe. And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out — years and years, oftentimes. So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on. And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning. There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. You won't discover anything. And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. (Laughter) And they all operate at the same time. There is also a big question of ambiguity. And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." A very famous Chinese saying, she said. And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "saving fish from drowning." And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die. Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors — actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." And it was a warning — don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. But, both of these sayings — saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning — to me they had to do with intentions. And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. And then we have intentions. There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? What are we supposed to do? Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called "Saving Fish From Drowning." I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. I got these hints everywhere. And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it's happening all the time. You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often. But you apply this. You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? Why or why not? It may be something that is perhaps more serious — as I said, human rights in Burma. I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, "Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?" And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book — and I just would have to face that later, when the time came. We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. This leads to this question. When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child — and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe? It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother. There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. And I needed to find something historically that would match that. And I took down this book, and I — first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed — was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God. You wonder, are these things random chance? Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? And that goes into the story, too. These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen. Another chance encounter is when I went to a place — I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. For some reason I wrote about cairns — stacks of rocks — that a man was building. And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. And I asked him, "How is it possible to do this?" And he said, "Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance." And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. I had so many examples — I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant? A big thing that I also think about is accidents. And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. What is the nature of accidents? And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. Responsibility was assigned to the family. The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. It's the son, not the father." When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men — a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen. So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me — to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. I also believe that in thinking about things — my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces — I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined — and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. So, there are never complete answers. Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only — there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating. And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story — in one story — then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. There she is. Thank you very much! (Applause)

Making sense of string theory

Brian Greene

{0: 'Brian Greene'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: 'Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.'}

2005-02-02

2008-04-22

TED2005

en

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

['String theory', 'physics', 'science', 'universe']

{253: "CERN's supercollider", 326: 'Shedding light on dark matter', 371: 'An 8-dimensional model of the universe', 2396: 'Have we reached the end of physics?', 1853: 'Why our universe might exist on a knife-edge', 194: 'Beauty, truth and ... physics?'}

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

Physicist Brian Greene explains superstring theory, the idea that minscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.

In the year 1919, a virtually unknown German mathematician, named Theodor Kaluza suggested a very bold and, in some ways, a very bizarre idea. He proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of. That is in addition to left, right, back, forth and up, down, Kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we don't yet see. Now, when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea, sometimes that's all it is — bold and bizarre, but it has nothing to do with the world around us. This particular idea, however — although we don't yet know whether it's right or wrong, and at the end I'll discuss experiments which, in the next few years, may tell us whether it's right or wrong — this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research. So, I'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions. So where do we go? To begin we need a little bit of back story. Go to 1907. This is a year when Einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project, to try to understand fully the grand, pervasive force of gravity. And in that moment, there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved. Newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well, describes the motion of planets, the motion of the moon and so forth, the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees, hitting people on the head. All of that could be described using Newton's work. But Einstein realized that Newton had left something out of the story, because even Newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity, he'd been unable to figure out how it really works. How is it that the Sun, 93 million miles away, [that] somehow it affects the motion of the Earth? How does the Sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence? And that is a task to which Einstein set himself — to figure out how gravity works. And let me show you what it is that he found. So Einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself. The idea goes like this: imagine space is a substrate of all there is. Einstein said space is nice and flat, if there's no matter present. But if there is matter in the environment, such as the Sun, it causes the fabric of space to warp, to curve. And that communicates the force of gravity. Even the Earth warps space around it. Now look at the Moon. The Moon is kept in orbit, according to these ideas, because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the Sun and the Moon and the Earth can all create by virtue of their presence. We go to a full-frame view of this. The Earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that's curved because of the Sun's presence. That is this new idea about how gravity actually works. Now, this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations. It really works. It describes the data. And this gained Einstein prominence around the world. And that is what got Kaluza thinking. He, like Einstein, was in search of what we call a unified theory. That's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature's forces from one set of ideas, one set of principles, one master equation, if you will. So Kaluza said to himself, Einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space — in fact, space and time, to be more precise. Maybe I can play the same game with the other known force, which was, at that time, known as the electromagnetic force — we know of others today, but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about. You know, the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth. So Kaluza says, maybe I can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves. That raised a question: warps and curves in what? Einstein had already used up space and time, warps and curves, to describe gravity. There didn't seem to be anything else to warp or curve. So Kaluza said, well, maybe there are more dimensions of space. He said, if I want to describe one more force, maybe I need one more dimension. So he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space, not three, and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension. Now here's the thing: when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions, not three, he found the old equations that Einstein had already derived in three dimensions — those were for gravity — but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension. And when he looked at that equation, it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force. Amazing — it just popped out. He was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming, "Victory!" — that he had found the unified theory. Now clearly, Kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously. He, in fact — there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim, he read a book, a treatise on swimming — (Laughter) — then dove into the ocean. This is a man who would risk his life on theory. Now, but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded, two questions immediately arise from his observation. Number one: if there are more dimensions in space, where are they? We don't seem to see them. And number two: does this theory really work in detail, when you try to apply it to the world around us? Now, the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named Oskar Klein. He suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties — there might be big, easy-to-see dimensions, but there might also be tiny, curled-up dimensions, curled up so small, even though they're all around us, that we don't see them. Let me show you that one visually. So, imagine you're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light. It's in Manhattan. You're in Central Park — it's kind of irrelevant — but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint, but you and I all know that it does have some thickness. It's very hard to see it, though, from far away. But if we zoom in and take the perspective of, say, a little ant walking around — little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions — the long dimension, but also this clockwise, counter-clockwise direction. And I hope you appreciate this. It took so long to get these ants to do this. (Laughter) But this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts: big and small. And the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see, but there might be additional dimensions curled up, sort of like the circular part of that cable, so small that they have so far remained invisible. Let me show you what that would look like. So, if we take a look, say, at space itself — I can only show, of course, two dimensions on a screen. Some of you guys will fix that one day, but anything that's not flat on a screen is a new dimension, goes smaller, smaller, smaller, and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself, this is the idea, you could have additional curled up dimensions — here is a little shape of a circle — so small that we don't see them. But if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around, you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about — that's like the grid part — but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that's so small that we can't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment. But deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself, the idea is there could be more dimensions, as we see there. Now that's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see. But what about the second question that I asked: does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world? Well, it turns out that Einstein and Kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time, and, in detail, it didn't work. In detail, for instance, they couldn't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory. So many people worked on it, but by the '40s, certainly by the '50s, this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away. Until something wonderful happened in our age. In our era, a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself, many others around the world, it's called superstring theory, as you were indicating. And the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions, but when we study superstring theory, we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling, new form. So, let me just tell you how that goes. Superstring theory — what is it? Well, it's a theory that tries to answer the question: what are the basic, fundamental, indivisible, uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us? The idea is like this. So, imagine we look at a familiar object, just a candle in a holder, and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of. So we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents. So deep inside — we all know, you go sufficiently far down, you have atoms. We also all know that atoms are not the end of the story. They have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons. Even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks. That is where conventional ideas stop. Here is the new idea of string theory. Deep inside any of these particles, there is something else. This something else is this dancing filament of energy. It looks like a vibrating string — that's where the idea, string theory comes from. And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns, these can also vibrate in different patterns. They don't produce different musical notes. Rather, they produce the different particles making up the world around us. So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like. It's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies. The different frequencies produce the different particles. The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us. And there you see unification, because matter particles, electrons and quarks, radiation particles, photons, gravitons, are all built up from one entity. So matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings. And that's what we mean by a unified theory. Now here is the catch. When you study the mathematics of string theory, you find that it doesn't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space. It doesn't work in a universe with four dimensions of space, nor five, nor six. Finally, you can study the equations, and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time. It leads us right back to this idea of Kaluza and Klein — that our world, when appropriately described, has more dimensions than the ones that we see. Now you might think about that and say, well, OK, you know, if you have extra dimensions, and they're really tightly curled up, yeah, perhaps we won't see them, if they're small enough. But if there's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there, and you make them small enough, and we won't see them either. That is true. One of the other predictions of string theory — no, that's not one of the other predictions of string theory. (Laughter) But it raises the question: are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions, or do they tell us something about the world? In the remaining time, I'd like to tell you two features of them. First is, many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics, theoretical science. And that question is this: when we look around the world, as scientists have done for the last hundred years, there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe. These are numbers like the mass of the particles, like electrons and quarks, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force — a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision, but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do. Now, does string theory offer an answer? Not yet. But we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions. And the wonderful thing is, if those numbers had any other values than the known ones, the universe, as we know it, wouldn't exist. This is a deep question. Why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form, when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers — if I had 20 dials up here and I let you come up and fiddle with those numbers, almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear. So can we explain those 20 numbers? And string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions. Let me show you how. So when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory, it's not one extra dimension, as in the older ideas of Kaluza and Klein. This is what string theory says about the extra dimensions. They have a very rich, intertwined geometry. This is an example of something known as a Calabi-Yau shape — name isn't all that important. But, as you can see, the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape, interesting structure. And the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like, then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales. When you swing your hand, you'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again, but they're so small that we wouldn't know it. So what is the physical implication, though, relevant to those 20 numbers? Consider this. If you look at the instrument, a French horn, notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument. Now in string theory, all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate. So just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument, strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving. So let me bring some strings into the story. And if you watch these little fellows vibrating around — they'll be there in a second — right there, notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions. So, if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like — we don't yet, but if we did — we should be able to calculate the allowed notes, the allowed vibrational patterns. And if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns, we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers. And if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation, this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is. Now, the second issue that I want to finish up with is: how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly? Is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world, or can we actually test for these extra dimensions? And we think — and this is, I think, very exciting — that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions. Here's how it goes. In CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, a machine is being built called the Large Hadron Collider. It's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel, opposite directions, near the speed of light. Every so often those particles will be aimed at each other, so there's a head-on collision. The hope is that if the collision has enough energy, it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions, forcing it to enter into the other dimensions. How would we know it? Well, we'll measure the amount of energy after the collision, compare it to the amount of energy before, and if there's less energy after the collision than before, this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away. And if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate, this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there. Let me show you that idea visually. So, imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton — that's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out, if the extra dimensions are real. But here's how the experiment will go. You take these particles. You slam them together. You slam them together, and if we are right, some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions. So this is the kind of experiment that we'll be looking at in the next five, seven to 10 years or so. And if this experiment bears fruit, if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there's less energy in our dimensions than when we began, this will show that the extra dimensions are real. And to me this is a really remarkable story, and a remarkable opportunity. Going back to Newton with absolute space — didn't provide anything but an arena, a stage in which the events of the universe take place. Einstein comes along and says, well, space and time can warp and curve — that's what gravity is. And now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see. And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime. Amazing possibility. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Wake up! It's They Might Be Giants!

They Might Be Giants

{0: ' They Might Be Giants'}

{0: ['band']}

{0: 'John Linnell and John Flansburgh are They Might Be Giants: multi-instrumental, tech-savvy and implacably prolific, they are the musicians of choice of geeks, tinkerers and curious kids of all ages.'}

2007-03-03

2008-04-29

TED2007

en

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

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

{374: 'Aliens, love -- where are they?', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 287: '"Clonie"', 416: 'A plea for bees', 2249: "The first 21 days of a bee's life", 1522: 'Every city needs healthy honey bees'}

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

In a very, very early-morning set, They Might Be Giants rock TED2007, playing "Older," "Bee of the Bird of the Moth," "Asbury Park," "Fingertips," and "The Alphabet of Nations." Plus they take phone calls from the dead.

(Bass guitar) (Bass guitar and accordion) ♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're even older. ♫ ♫ You're older than you've even been ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're older still. ♫ ♫ Time ♫ ♫ is marching on ♫ ♫ and time ♫ ♫ is still marching on. ♫ ♫ This day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it's even sooner. ♫ ♫ This day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it's sooner still. ♫ ♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're even older. ♫ ♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you're even older ♫ ♫ and now you're older still. ♫ Thank you very much. Good morning everybody. We are They Might Be Giants. (Applause) I am wearing the Al Gore in-ear monitors he wore on the Larry King show and I'm hearing that transmission and not mine. But I guess that's in keeping, so now we'll just move to the PowerPoint presentation, ladies and gentlemen. This is a brand new song. In the spirit of TED, we're bringing you something that has not been released. John, do you want to introduce the song? This is a song about a creature called a hummingbird moth which imitates another creature which imitates yet another creature. It's completely fucked up and can only be explained in song. ♫ Everyone is crying at the dread hypnotic flying ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ You can't walk, you can't ramble ♫ ♫ 'cause you're gonna have to scramble ♫ ♫ from the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ Catbird is a cat ♫ ♫ but he's got bugness in his veins. ♫ ♫ Manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains. ♫ ♫ Neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ Now the moth ♫ ♫ defeats the mouse and man. ♫ ♫ It's messing with the plan. ♫ ♫ It can't be believed ♫ ♫ 'cause it's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who's acting like the bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it's a bee. ♫ ♫ Got a brand new shipment ♫ ♫ of electrical equipment ♫ ♫ it's addressed to the bottom of the sea. ♫ ♫ Send a tangerine-colored ♫ ♫ nuclear submarine ♫ ♫ with a sticker that says STP. ♫ ♫ Windshield wiper washer fluid ♫ ♫ spraying in the air ... ♫ ♫ headlights under head lice ♫ ♫ under hats lie everywhere. ♫ ♫ Subatomic waves ♫ ♫ to the underwater caves ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ Now the moth defeats the mouse and man. ♫ ♫ It's messing with the plan. ♫ ♫ It can't be believed ♫ ♫ 'cause it's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who's acting like a bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it's a bee. ♫ ♫ Is it us or is this messed up? ♫ ♫ Everyone's deforming ♫ ♫ in the presence of the swarming ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ Protozoa, snakes and horses ♫ ♫ have enlisted in the forces ♫ ♫ of the bee of bird of the moth. ♫ ♫ Catbug is a cat ♫ ♫ but he's got bugness in his veins. ♫ ♫ Manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains. ♫ ♫ Neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫ (Applause) Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. So we are past our 1,000th show. Probably somewhere around 1,500. It's hard to know. We've only done two shows in 2007 so far, but our first show was actually the coldest performance we've ever had. It was 19 degrees in St. Louis about a month ago and I'm happy to report that this performance you are seeing today is the earliest we have ever performed. So thank you. We are cultural test pilots, ladies and gentlemen. How early can a rock performance begin? Not all the facts are in about performing at 8.30 in the morning. I can tell you the 19 degree thing was fantastic. All right. So we don't know that much about the history of violinists but we do know that when we entered the state of New Jersey there is an uptick in violence. This song is called "Asbury Park." It's based on a real life experience. ♫ I ♫ ♫ I got ♫ ♫ I got kicked ♫ ♫ I got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the Stone. ♫ ♫ Stone Pone. ♫ ♫ Stone Pony. ♫ ♫ I got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the Stone Pony ♫ ♫ where I swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer wasn't me. ♫ ♫ Me got ♫ ♫ Me got kicked ♫ ♫ Me got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the Stone. ♫ ♫ Stone Pone. ♫ ♫ Stone Pony. ♫ ♫ Me got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the Stone Pony ♫ ♫ where I swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer ♫ ♫ was a guy dressed like me. ♫ ♫ Not me! ♫ ♫ Not me! ♫ ♫ Not me! ♫ Thank you. Marty Beller on the drums over there. (Applause) We want to get in as many songs as possible during our brief time here so this is the one to play. This song is called "Fingertips." ♫ Everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ Yes, everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ Yes, everything is catching on fire. ♫ ♫ Fingertips ♫ ♫ Fingertips ♫ ♫ Fingertips ♫ ♫ I hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ I hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ It seems to say ♫ ♫ Hello ♫ ♫ Hello ♫ ♫ I'm the one who loves you so. ♫ ♫ Hey, now everybody, now. ♫ ♫ Hey, now everybody ♫ ♫ Hey, now everybody, now ♫ ♫ Who's that standing ♫ ♫ at the window?♫ ♫ I found a new friend ♫ ♫ underneath my pillow. ♫ ♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ Aren't you the guy who hit me in the eye? ♫ ♫ Aren't you the guy who hit me in the eye? ♫ ♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫ ♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫ ♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫ ♫ Leave me alone, leave me alone. ♫ ♫ Who's knocking on the wall? ♫ ♫ All alone, all alone. ♫ ♫ All by myself. ♫ ♫ What's that blue thing doing here? ♫ ♫ Something grabbed ahold of my hand ♫ ♫ I didn't know what had my hand ♫ ♫ but that's when all my troubles began. ♫ ♫ I don't understand you ♫ ♫ I don't understand you ♫ ♫ I cannot understand you ♫ ♫ I cannot understand you ♫ ♫ I don't understand the things you say ♫ ♫ I can't understand a single word ♫ ♫ I don't understand you ♫ ♫ I don't understand you ♫ ♫ I just don't understand you ♫ ♫ I don't understand you ♫ ♫ I do not understand you ♫ ♫ Don't understand you ♫ ♫ Don't understand you ♫ ♫ I turn around ♫ ♫ See the sound ♫ ♫ Turn around and see the thing ♫ ♫ that made the sound. ♫ ♫ Mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ Mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ Mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ Mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ The day that love came to play. ♫ ♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ I'm having a ... ♫ ♫ Fingertips ♫ ♫ Fingertips ♫ ♫ I walk along darkened corridors ♫ ♫ And I walk along darkened corridors ♫ Thank you very much — "Fingertips." (Applause) ♫ We're taking calls — from the dead. ♫ ♫ We're taking calls — from the dead. ♫ ♫ We're taking phone calls from the dead. ♫ ♫ They're calling from beyond the grave. ♫ ♫ Beyond the grave. ♫ ♫ They have some questions ♫ ♫ And things to share ♫ ♫ From underneath the cold, cold ground. ♫ We're soliciting phone calls from dead people as a special TED presentation. We're taking calls live on stage here at TED in Monterey. And I think we have a caller coming in here. Hello there. You're live. Hello. Who's there, please? Am I on the air? Hi there. You're on with They Might Be Giants. This is Eleanor Roosevelt. Hello, Eleanor, please ... I want to talk to ... Please turn off your radio, Eleanor. I wanna talk to Randi. I've got a question for Randi. What's your question, please? I want to talk to the Amazing Randi. Do you have a laminated badge, Eleanor? I want my million dollars. Eleanor, I'm sorry, do you have a laminated badge? No, I don't have a badge. Well, I think we're going to stop that part of the show. Here's a song we like to think of as the future anthem of TED. It's actually a children's song but like so many projects for children it's really just a Trojan horse for adult work. This song is called "The Alphabet ... Of Nations!" ♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫ ♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia ♫ ♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫ ♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫ ♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫ ♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫ ♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫ ♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫ ♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫ ♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia, ♫ ♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫ ♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫ ♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫ ♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫ ♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫ ♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫ ♫ Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Canada, ♫ ♫ Australia, Belgium, Chad, ♫ ♫ Afghanistan, Brunei, China, Denmark, ♫ ♫ Ecuador, Fiji, Guatemala, ♫ ♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫ ♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia, ♫ ♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫ ♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫ ♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫ ♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫ ♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫ ♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫ Thank you so much. You've been a wonderful 8:30 audience. Have a great session. Thank you all.

CERN's supercollider

Brian Cox

{0: 'Brian Cox'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: "Physicist Brian Cox has two jobs: working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and explaining big science to the general public. He's a professor at the University of Manchester."}

2008-03-03

2008-04-29

TED2008

en

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

['String theory', 'big bang', 'education', 'physics', 'science', 'technology', 'quantum physics']

{251: 'Making sense of string theory', 326: 'Shedding light on dark matter', 371: 'An 8-dimensional model of the universe', 23862: 'The beginning of the universe for beginners', 1853: 'Why our universe might exist on a knife-edge', 27790: "What's the smallest thing in the universe?"}

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

"Rock-star physicist" Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.

This is the Large Hadron Collider. It's 27 kilometers in circumference. It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. What we do is we accelerate protons — so, hydrogen nuclei — around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. We collide them inside giant detectors. They're essentially digital cameras. And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. You get some sense of the size — you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath. (Laughter) You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector — immense numbers. And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. This is a picture about a year ago. Those magnets are in there. And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year. And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today. (Applause) Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. So, you might be asking, "Why? Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began?" Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything. Now you might say, "Well, OK, but why not just look at it? You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me." Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things — human brains — are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple. It's almost like ... imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. And, as of today, it's made of these things. Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. The electron — the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named — very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you. And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just — I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? Just up the road. Relative to the universe, it's just up the road. (Laughter) So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set. So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible. (Laughter) But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it's built the way it is — really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. It's called the standard model — beautifully simple mathematical equation. You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. This is it. (Laughter) I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything — other than gravity — that happens in the universe. So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you've got a big enough computer — why DNA is the shape it is. In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation. But there's a problem. Can anyone see what it is? A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. Right, H. H stands for Higgs particle. Higgs particles have not been discovered. But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle. What does it do? Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, "If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. I want to know what this Higgs particle does." And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. And the picture is that the whole universe — and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. Higgs particles, if you will. The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. They're interacting with the Higgs field. If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. If it's not true — because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of — then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (Laughter) anyway. So that's one thing. That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find. There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature — it's quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. Well, they do change in strength. So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model — you can calculate how these change — is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. But they just miss. Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang — absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. Many other things that the LHC could discover. But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think — what particle physics really means to me — particle physics and cosmology. And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you'd like — about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful. The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the Big Bang. Gravity separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. The universe continued to expand and cool. After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today. It continued to expand about 300 million years. Then light began to travel through the universe. It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up — were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets. And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. Absolutely remarkable. And, the laws of physics. Right? So, the right laws of physics — they're beautifully balanced. If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. It makes me really feel that that civilization — which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms — then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable. So that's the LHC. The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. Thanks. (Applause)

The thinking behind 50x15

Hector Ruiz

{0: 'Hector Ruiz'}

{0: ['ceo']}

{0: "The executive chairman of AMD, Hector Ruiz is devoted to his company's 50x15 initiative, which seeks to give 50 percent of the world's population access to the internet by 2015."}

2007-06-06

2008-05-01

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'education', 'global issues', 'philanthropy', 'technology']

{288: 'One Laptop per Child, two years on', 79: 'How mobile phones can fight poverty', 59: 'My wish: Three actions for Africa', 892: 'Education innovation in the slums', 63: 'The era of open innovation', 1617: 'Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/hector_ruiz_the_thinking_behind_50x15/

Hector Ruiz, the executive chair of AMD, wants to give Internet access to everyone. In this talk, he shares his extraordinary life story and describes AMD's 50x15 initiative that calls for connecting 50 percent of the world by 2015.

You know, one of the things that I'd like to say upfront is that I'm really here by accident. And what I mean — not at TED — that I'm — at this point in my life, truly my set of circumstances I would truly consider an accident. But what I'd like to talk to you about today is perhaps a way in which we could use technology to make those accidents happen often. Because I really think, when I look back at how I actually ended up in this accident, technology played a big role in that. So, what I'd like to do today is tell you a little bit about myself, because I'd like to put in context what I'm going to tell you. And I think you will see why the two greatest passions in my life today are children and education. And once I put that in context, I'd like to tell you a little bit about technology: why I believe technology is a tremendous enabler; a very powerful tool to help address some of these challenges. Then, about the initiative that Chris mentioned, that we decided to launch at AMD that we call 50x15. And then I'll come back to the beginning, and tell you a little bit more — hopefully convince you — that I believe that in today's world, it is really important for business leaders not only to have an idea of what their business is all about, but to have a passion for something that is meaningful. So, with that in mind, first of all let me tell you, I'm one of five children. I'm the oldest, the other four are women. So I grew up in a family of women. I learned a lot about how to deal with that part of the world. (Laughter) And, as you can imagine, if you can picture this: I was born in a very small village in Mexico, in, unfortunately, very poor surroundings, and my parents did not have a college education. But I was fortunate to be able to have one, and so were my four sisters. That kind of tells you a little bit of an idea of the emphasis that my parents placed on education. My parents were fanatics about learning, and I'll come back to that a little bit later. But one of the things that exposed me early to learning, and a tremendous curiosity that was instilled in me as a child, was through a technology which is on the screen — is a Victrola. My father found that in a junkyard, and was able to repair it and make it work. And somehow — to this day, I frankly don't know how he was so aware of what was going on in the world — but, by inviting me to sit down with him when I was only a few years old, and playing records in this Victrola by Mozart, and he would tell me how Mozart was the most romantic of all the classic composers ever, and how Claire de Lune, which was one of his favorites, was a real exposure to me to classical music. He explained to me about Johann Strauss, and how he created the waltzes that became so famous in the world. And would tell me a little bit about history too, when he'd play the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky on this little Victrola, and he would tell me about Russia and all the things that were happening in Russia at those times and why this music, in some way, represented a little bit of that history. And even as a child, he was able to instill in me a lot of curiosity. And perhaps to you this product may not look like high tech, but if you can imagine the time when this occurred — it was in the mid '40s — this was really, in his view, a pretty piece of high tech. Well, one of the things that is really critical to try to distill from that experience is that in addition to that, people ask me and say, "Well, how did your parents treat you when you were a child?" And I always said that they were really tough on me. And not tough in the sense that most people think of, where your parents yell at you or hit you or whatever. They were tough in the sense that, as I grew up, both my mother and father would always say to me, it's really important that you always remember two things. First of all, when you go to bed at night, you've got to look back on the day and make sure that you felt the day was a day which you contributed something, and that you did everything you could to do it the best way you could. And the second thing they said: and we trust you, that no matter where you are or where you go, you will always do the right thing. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever done that with your kids, but if you do, please trust me, it's the most pressure you can put on a child, to say — (Laughter) — we trust you that you will always do the right thing. When I was out with my friends drinking beer, I always was very aware of those words — (Laughter) — and very careful. One of the things that has happened with technology is that it can only be helpful if it is useful, of course, but it can only be helpful too if it's accessible, and it can only be helpful if it's affordable. And in today's world, being useful, affordable and accessible is not necessarily what happens in a lot of the technology that is done today. So, one of our passions in our company, and now one of my personal passions, is to be able to really work hard at making the technology useful, accessible and affordable. And to me, that is very, very critical. Now, technology has changed a lot since the Victrola days. You know, we now have, of course, incredibly powerful computers. A tremendous thing that people refer to as a killer app is called the Internet. Although frankly speaking, we don't believe the Internet is the killer app. What we believe is that the Internet, frankly, is a connection of people and ideas. The Internet happens to be just the medium in which those people and ideas get connected. And the power of connecting people and ideas can be pretty awesome. And so, we believe that through all the changes that have occurred, that we're faced today with a tremendous opportunity. If we can connect people and ideas more intensely — and although you've seen a plethora and a myriad of products that have come to the market today, the key to me is how many of these products are able to provide people connectivity, in a useful way, accessibility, in an easy manner, and also affordability, that regardless of the economic status that a person could have, that they could have the opportunity to afford this technology. So, when you look at that, we said, well, we would like to, then, enable that a little bit. We would like to create an initiative. And a couple of years ago at AMD, we came up with this idea of saying, what if we create this initiative we call 50x15, where we are going to aim, that by the year 2015, half of the world will be connected to the Internet so that people and ideas can get connected. We knew we couldn't do it by ourselves, and by no means did we ever intend to imply that we at AMD could do it alone. We always felt that this was something that could be done through partnerships with governments, industry, educational institutions, a myriad of other companies and, frankly, even competitors. So, it is really a rather lofty initiative, if you want to think that way, but we felt that we had to put a real stake up in the years ahead, that was bold enough and courageous enough that it would force us all to think of ways to do things differently. And I'll come back to that in a minute, because I think the results so far have been remarkable, and I can only anticipate and get real excited about what I think is going to happen in the next eight years, while we get to the 2015 initiative. Where are we today? That's year by year. This comes from our friends at Gapminder.com. Those of you who've never looked at their website, you should look at it. It's really impressive. And you can see how the Internet penetration has changed over the years. And so when we gave ourselves this scorecard to say well, where are we related to our goal towards 2015, the thing that becomes apparent is three pieces. One is the Western world, defined mostly by Western Europe and the United States, has made an awful lot of progress. The connectivity in these parts of the world are really truly phenomenal and continue to increase. As a matter of fact, we think reaching 100 percent is very doable, even before the 2015 timeframe. In other parts of emerging countries, such as India and China, the progress has been good — has been solid, has been good. But in places that are not as developed, places like Africa, Latin America and other places in the world, the progress has been rather slow. As a matter of fact, I was just recently visiting South Africa. I had the opportunity to have a discussion with President Mbeki, and one of the things that we talked about is, what is it that's keeping this connectivity goal from moving ahead faster? And one of the reasons is, in South Africa, it costs 100 dollars a month to have a broadband connectivity. It is impossible, even in the United States, for that cost, to be able to enable the connectivity that we're all trying to reach. So, we talked about ways in which perhaps one could partner to be able to bring the cost of this technology down. So, when you look at this chart, you look at the very last — it's a logarithmic chart on a horizontal scale — you look at the very end: we've got quite a long way to go to get to the 2015 goal of 50 percent. But we're excited in our company; we're motivated. We really think it's a phenomenal driver of things, to force us to do things differently, and we look forward to being able to actually, working with so many partners around the world, to be able to reach that goal. Now, one of the things I'd like to explain [about] 50x15, which I think is really critical, is that it is not a charity. It is actually a business venture. Let's take a small segment of this, of this unconnected world, and call it the education market. When you look at elementary-school children, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of children around the world that could benefit tremendously from being able to be connected to the Internet. Therefore, when we see that, we see an opportunity to have a business that addresses the need of that segment. And when we embarked in this initiative, from the very beginning we said it very clearly: this is not a charity. This is really a business venture, one that addresses a very challenging segment of the market. Because what we have learned in the last three years is that this segment of the market, whether it's education or under-developed nations, either way, it's a segment that demands incredibly high quality, incredibly high reliability, tremendous low cost and access, and a lot of challenges that frankly, without actually doing it, it would be very difficult to understand, and I'll explain that in just a minute. It is an initiative that is focused on simple, accessible and human-centric solutions. What we mean by that is, you know, frankly, the PC was invented in 1980, roughly speaking more or less, and for 20-odd years, it hasn't changed. It is still, in most places, a gray or black box, and it looks the same. And frankly — and I know that sometimes I offend some of my customers when I say this, but I truly mean it — if you could take the name of the computer off the top of it, it would be very difficult to judge who made it, because they're all highly commoditized but they're all different. So, there has not been a human-centric approach to addressing this segment of the market, so we really believe it is critical to think of it. It reminded me a lot of the talk we heard this morning, about this operating room machinery that was designed specifically for Africa. We're talking about something very similar here. And it has to be based on a geo-sensitive approach. What I mean by that is that in some parts of the world, the government plays a key role in the development of technology. In other parts, it doesn't. In other parts of the world, you have an infrastructure that allows for manufacturing to take place. In other parts, it doesn't. And then we have to be sensitive about how this technology can be developed and put into action in those regions. And the last piece, which is really important — and this is an opinion that we have, not shared by many, this is one where we seem to stand alone, on this one — is that we really believe that the greatest success of this initiative can come by fostering local, integrated, end-to-end ecosystems. What I mean by that, and let me use this example, the country of South Africa, because I was just there, therefore I'm a little bit familiar with some of the challenges they have. It's a country of 45 million people. It's an economy that's emerging. It's beginning to grow tremendously. They have an objective to lowering the cost of connectivity. They have a computer company that makes computers in South Africa. They're developing a software-training environment in their universities. What a place, what an ideal place to create an ecosystem that could build the hardware and the software needed for their schools. And to my surprise, I learned in South Africa they have 18 dialects, I always thought they only had two — English and Afrikaans — but it turns out they have 18 dialects. And to be able to meet the needs of this rather complex educational system, it could only be done from inside. I don't think this segment of the market can be addressed by companies parachuting from another place of the world, and just dumping product and selling into the markets. So, we believe that in those regions of the world where the population is large, and there's an infrastructure that can provide it, that a local, integrated, end-to-end system is really critical for its success. This is a picture of a classroom that we outfitted with computers in Mexico, in my home country. This particular classroom happens to be in the state of Michoacan. Those of you that might be familiar with Mexico — Michoacan is a very colorful state. Children dress with very colorful, colorful clothes, and it is incredible to see the power that this has in the hands of kids, in a computer. And I have to tell you that it's so easy to appreciate the impact that access to technology and connectivity can have in the lives and education of these kids. We just recently opened a learning laboratory in a school in the West Cape in South Africa, in a school that's called Nelson Mandela School, and when you see the faces and activities of these children being able to access computers, it's just phenomenal. And recently, they've written us letters, telling us how excited they are about the impact that this has had on their lives, on their educational dreams, on their capabilities, and it's just phenomenal. We have now deployed 30 different technologists in 18 different countries, and we have been able to connect millions of people in an effort to continue to learn what this particular segment of the market needs and demands. And I have to tell you that although millions doesn't sound like a lot in terms of the billions that need to be connected, it's a start. And we are learning a lot. And we're learning a tremendous amount about what we believe this segment needs to be able to be effective. One example of this has been the One Laptop per Child. Some of you are familiar with this. This is a partnership between MIT and a group of companies — Google is involved, Red Hat — and AMD is a key player. The electronics behind the One Laptop per Child are based on AMD technology; it's a microprocessor. But to give you an idea how creative this group of people can be, one of the objectives of the One Laptop per Child is to be able to achieve a 10-hour battery life. Because it was felt that a school day would last at least eight hours, and you wanted the child to have the ability to use the laptop for at least one full day without having to recharge it. The engineers have done a phenomenal amount of innovation on this part, and battery life on this product is now 15 hours — just through a lot of innovative work people have done because they're passionate and motivated to be able to do this. We expect this to be deployed towards the end of this year, and we're very excited at the opportunities that this is going to offer in the field of education. It's a highly focused product aimed at strictly the education market, not only in the developing countries, but actually in the developed regions as well, because there are parts of the United States where this can have also a huge impact on the ability to make education more fun and more efficient. We also have partnered with TED in this project, with Architecture for Humanity, and along with the TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair, we're having a contest that we have issued to the architectural community to come up with the best design for a computer lab for an emerging region. And we're really thrilled about the opportunity to be part of this, and can't wait to see what comes out of this exciting, exciting activity. Let me come back to the beginning, to end this presentation. I'll tell you that one of the things that I feel is really critical for us in industry, in business, is to be able to be passionate about solving these problems. I don't think it's enough to be able to put them on a spreadsheet, and look at numbers and say, yes, that's a good business. I really believe that you have to have a passion for it. And one of the things that I learned, too, from my parents — and I'll give you a little anecdote — especially from my father. And it took me a while to understand it, but he said to me, when I went to college, he said, "You're the first person in the family to go to college. And it's really important you understand that for civilization to make progress, each generation has to do better than the last one. And therefore, this is your opportunity to do better than my generation." Frankly, I don't know that I really understood what he told me at the time. I was eager to go off to college, and go find girls, and study, and girls, and study, but then I finished college and I fell in love. I graduated. I decided to get married. And on my wedding day, my father came to me again and said, "You know, I'm going to remind you again, that each generation has to do better than the last one. You have to be a better husband than I was, because that's how you make progress." And now he began to make sense. Because I knew what a great husband he was, and now he was once again beginning to put pressure on me, like he did when I was a little kid. And then a few years later, I had a child, my first child, and again, my father comes to the hospital, and we're looking at the glass, and see all the children on the other side, and he said, "I've got to remind you again, that for each generation to do better, you're going to have to be a better father than I was." That's when it dawned on me the tremendous challenge that he was placing on me, because he was a great father. But the key is that he instilled in me a passion to really get up every day in the morning and want to do better, to really get up and think that my role in life is not just to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It's got to be that someday I can look back, and this place is truly better through some small contribution that perhaps each of us could make. Thank you very much. (Applause)

6 ways mushrooms can save the world

Paul Stamets

{0: 'Paul Stamets'}

{0: ['mycologist']}

{0: 'Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems and transform other worlds.'}

2008-03-03

2008-05-06

TED2008

en

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

['biology', 'design', 'food', 'global issues', 'pollution', 'science', 'technology', 'fungi']

{214: "A plant's-eye view", 198: 'The fractals at the heart of African designs', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 948: "The world's oldest living things", 1247: 'My mushroom burial suit', 44494: 'The secret language of trees'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world/

Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe: cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu viruses.

I love a challenge, and saving the Earth is probably a good one. We all know the Earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X, the sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered, if there was a United Organization of Organisms — otherwise known as "Uh-Oh" — (Laughter) — and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now. I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature — the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium — so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs. Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday, this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those. Most of you are familiar with Portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle. When I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think Portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So, I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown, when it comes to fungi. Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. Day 21, day 23, day 25. Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta — a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium. And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium. This is photomicrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium, I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. And in these cavities, these micro-cavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbial communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms. I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing — Internet engineers maybe call them hot points — there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. So, I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven, biologically successful model. The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere. Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life; life becomes single cells; single cells become strings; strings become chains; chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe. Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible? It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix. This was first discovered in 1859. This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years. Now, we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward — 65 million years ago — most of you know about it — we had an asteroid impact. The Earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So, the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a forgone conclusion, at least in my own mind. The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size: 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us? The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom — it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt. We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington. There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste: one was a control pile; one pile was treated with enzymes; one pile was treated with bacteria; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes — peroxidases — that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So, the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates — fungal sugars. Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's — the aromatic hydrocarbons — went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. The last image we don't have. The entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species, vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities. So I invented burlap sacks, bunker spawn — and putting the mycelium — using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. So, we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. And I'll show you a graph here. This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris — and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year. So, this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis — Agarikon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington State, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large — let's get closer. This is extremely rare fungus. Our team — and we have a team of experts that go out — we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year. We found one sample to be able to get into culture. Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. And a few years ago, we received these results. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 10 or greater are considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read — it's vetted by DOD — if you Google "Stamets" and "smallpox." Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview. So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. And so, for the first time, I am showing this. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the selectivity index numbers — against pox, you saw 10s and 20s — now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses — H1N1, H3N2 — as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. (Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause) I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi — fungi that kill insects. Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. So, I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores. These are spores — this is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever. And then — a delicate dance between dinner and death — the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. (Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So, the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So, you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites. And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. Then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent — and this is a big one. It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent. It covers over 200,000 species. This is the most disruptive technology — I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry — that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores. And so I came up with a Life Box, because I needed a delivery system. The Life Box — you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference — you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom. The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing — potentially — an old-growth forest from a cardboard box. I want to reinvent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code specific — where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes. You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water — I developed this for the refugee community — corns, beans and squash and onions. I took several containers — my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could — and I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds — and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this — and then you're harvesting the seed garden. Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels. I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corncobs. Now, three corncobs, no other grain — lots of mushrooms begin to form. Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here. The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol. Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary — and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. So, we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils. These are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Can we domesticate germs?

Paul Ewald

{0: 'Paul Ewald'}

{0: ['evolutionary biologist']}

{0: "After years of studying illness from the germs' point of view, microbiologist Paul Ewald believes that Big Pharma is wrong about some very big issues. What's right? The leader in evolutionary medicine posits radical new approaches."}

2007-03-03

2008-05-07

TED2007

en

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

['bacteria', 'biology', 'disease', 'evolution', 'global issues', 'health', 'illness', 'medicine', 'microbiology', 'science']

{499: 'The jungle search for viruses', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 261: 'A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows', 1819: '3 reasons we still haven’t gotten rid of malaria', 24006: 'The loathsome lethal mosquito', 1641: 'Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease'}

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

Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald drags us into the sewer to discuss germs. Why are some more harmful than others? How could we make the harmful ones benign? Searching for answers, he examines a disgusting, fascinating case: diarrhea.

What I'd like to do is just drag us all down into the gutter, and actually all the way down into the sewer because I want to talk about diarrhea. And in particular, I want to talk about the design of diarrhea. And when evolutionary biologists talk about design, they really mean design by natural selection. And that brings me to the title of the talk, "Using Evolution to Design Disease Organisms Intelligently." And I also have a little bit of a sort of smartass subtitle to this. But I'm not just doing this to be cute. I really think that this subtitle explains what somebody like me, who's sort of a Darwin wannabe, how they actually look at one's role in sort of coming into this field of health sciences and medicine. It's really not a very friendly field for evolutionary biologists. You actually see a great potential, but you see a lot of people who are sort of defending their turf, and may actually be very resistant, when one tries to introduce ideas. So, all of the talk today is going to deal with two general questions. One is that, why are some disease organisms more harmful? And a very closely related question, which is, how can we take control of this situation once we understand the answer to the first question? How can we make the harmful organisms more mild? And I'm going to be talking, to begin with, as I said, about diarrheal disease organisms. And the focus when I'm talking about the diarrheal organisms, as well as the focus when I'm talking about any organisms that cause acute infectious disease, is to think about the problem from a germ's point of view, germ's-eye view. And in particular, to think about a fundamental idea which I think makes sense out of a tremendous amount of variation in the harmfulness of disease organisms. And that idea is that from the germ's-eye point of view, disease organisms have to get from one host to another, and often they have to rely on the well-being of the host to move them to another host. But not always. Sometimes, you get disease organisms that don't rely on host mobility at all for transmission. And when you have that, then evolutionary theory tells us that natural selection will favor the more exploitative, more predator-like organisms. So, natural selection will favor organisms that are more likely to cause damage. If instead transmission to another host requires host mobility, then we expect that the winners of the competition will be the milder organisms. So, if the pathogen doesn't need the host to be healthy and active, and actual selection favors pathogens that take advantage of those hosts, the winners in the competition are those that exploit the hosts for their own reproductive success. But if the host needs to be mobile in order to transmit the pathogen, then it's the benign ones that tend to be the winners. So, I'm going to begin by applying this idea to diarrheal diseases. Diarrheal disease organisms get transmitted in basically three ways. They can be transmitted from person-to-person contact, person-to-food-then-to-person contact, when somebody eats contaminated food, or they can be transmitted through the water. And when they're transmitted through the water, unlike the first two modes of transmission, these pathogens don't rely on a healthy host for transmission. A person can be sick in bed and still infect tens, even hundreds of other individuals. To sort of illustrate that, this diagram emphasizes that if you've got a sick person in bed, somebody's going to be taking out the contaminated materials. They're going to wash those contaminated materials, and then the water may move into sources of drinking water. People will come in to those places where you've got contaminated drinking water, bring things back to the family, may drink right at that point. The whole point is that a person who can't move can still infect many other individuals. And so, the theory tells us that when diarrheal disease organisms are transported by water, we expect them to be more predator-like, more harmful. And you can test these ideas. So, one way you can test is just look at all diarrheal bacteria, and see whether or not the ones that tend to be more transmitted by water, tend to be more harmful. And the answer is — yep, they are. Now I put those names in there just for the bacteria buffs, but the main point here is that — (Laughter) there's a lot of them here, I can tell — the main point here is that those data points all show a very strong, positive association between the degree to which a disease organism is transmitted by water, and how harmful they are, how much death they cause per untreated infection. So this suggests we're on the right track. But this, to me, suggests that we really need to ask some additional questions. Remember the second question that I raised at the outset was, how can we use this knowledge to make disease organisms evolve to be mild? Now, this suggests that if you could just block waterborne transmission, you could cause disease organisms to shift from the right-hand side of that graph to the left-hand side of the graph. But it doesn't tell you how long. I mean, if this would require thousands of years, then it's worthless in terms of controlling of these pathogens. But if it could occur in just a few years, then it might be a very important way to control some of the nasty problems that we haven't been able to control. In other words, this suggests that we could domesticate these organisms. We could make them evolve to be not so harmful to us. And so, as I was thinking about this, I focused on this organism, which is the El Tor biotype of the organism called Vibrio cholerae. And that is the species of organism that is responsible for causing cholera. And the reason I thought this is a really great organism to look at is that we understand why it's so harmful. It's harmful because it produces a toxin, and that toxin is released when the organism gets into our intestinal tract. It causes fluid to flow from the cells that line our intestine into the lumen, the internal chamber of our intestine, and then that fluid goes the only way it can, which is out the other end. And it flushes out thousands of different other competitors that would otherwise make life difficult for the Vibrios. So what happens, if you've got an organism, it produces a lot of toxin. After a few days of infection you end up having — the fecal material really isn't so disgusting as we might imagine. It's sort of cloudy water. And if you took a drop of that water, you might find a million diarrheal organisms. If the organism produced a lot of toxin, you might find 10 million, or 100 million. If it didn't produce a lot of this toxin, then you might find a smaller number. So the task is to try to figure out how to determine whether or not you could get an organism like this to evolve towards mildness by blocking waterborne transmission, thereby allowing the organism only to be transmitted by person-to-person contact, or person-food-person contact — both of which would really require that people be mobile and fairly healthy for transmission. Now, I can think of some possible experiments. One would be to take a lot of different strains of this organism — some that produce a lot of toxins, some that produce a little — and take those strains and spew them out in different countries. Some countries that might have clean water supplies, so that you can't get waterborne transmission: you expect the organism to evolve to mildness there. Other countries, in which you've got a lot of waterborne transmission, there you expect these organisms to evolve towards a high level of harmfulness, right? There's a little ethical problem in this experiment. I was hoping to hear a few gasps at least. That makes me worry a little bit. (Laughter) But anyhow, the laughter makes me feel a little bit better. And this ethical problem's a big problem. Just to emphasize this, this is what we're really talking about. Here's a girl who's almost dead. She got rehydration therapy, she perked up, within a few days she was looking like a completely different person. So, we don't want to run an experiment like that. But interestingly, just that thing happened in 1991. In 1991, this cholera organism got into Lima, Peru, and within two months it had spread to the neighboring areas. Now, I don't know how that happened, and I didn't have anything to do with it, I promise you. I don't think anybody knows, but I'm not averse to, once that's happened, to see whether or not the prediction that we would make, that I did make before, actually holds up. Did the organism evolve to mildness in a place like Chile, which has some of the most well protected water supplies in Latin America? And did it evolve to be more harmful in a place like Ecuador, which has some of the least well protected? And Peru's got something sort of in between. And so, with funding from the Bosack-Kruger Foundation, I got a lot of strains from these different countries and we measured their toxin production in the lab. And we found that in Chile — within two months of the invasion of Peru you had strains entering Chile — and when you look at those strains, in the very far left-hand side of this graph, you see a lot of variation in the toxin production. Each dot corresponds to an islet from a different person — a lot of variation on which natural selection can act. But the interesting point is, if you look over the 1990s, within a few years the organisms evolved to be more mild. They evolved to produce less toxin. And to just give you a sense of how important this might be, if we look in 1995, we find that there's only one case of cholera, on average, reported from Chile every two years. So, it's controlled. That's how much we have in America, cholera that's acquired endemically, and we don't think we've got a problem here. They didn't — they solved the problem in Chile. But, before we get too confident, we'd better look at some of those other countries, and make sure that this organism doesn't just always evolve toward mildness. Well, in Peru it didn't. And in Ecuador — remember, this is the place where it has the highest potential waterborne transmission — it looked like it got more harmful. In every case there's a lot of variation, but something about the environment the people are living in, and I think the only realistic explanation is that it's the degree of waterborne transmission, favored the harmful strains in one place, and mild strains in another. So, this is very encouraging, it suggests that something that we might want to do anyhow, if we had enough money, could actually give us a much bigger bang for the buck. It would make these organisms evolve to mildness, so that even though people might be getting infected, they'd be infected with mild strains. It wouldn't be causing severe disease. But there's another really interesting aspect of this, and this is that if you could control the evolution of virulence, evolution of harmfulness, then you should be able to control antibiotic resistance. And the idea is very simple. If you've got a harmful organism, a high proportion of the people are going to be symptomatic, a high proportion of the people are going to be going to get antibiotics. You've got a lot of pressure favoring antibiotic resistance, so you get increased virulence leading to the evolution of increased antibiotic resistance. And once you get increased antibiotic resistance, the antibiotics aren't knocking out the harmful strains anymore. So, you've got a higher level of virulence. So, you get this vicious cycle. The goal is to turn this around. If you could cause an evolutionary decrease in virulence by cleaning up the water supply, you should be able to get an evolutionary decrease in antibiotic resistance. So, we can go to the same countries and look and see. Did Chile avoid the problem of antibiotic resistance, whereas did Ecuador actually have the beginnings of the problem? If we look in the beginning of the 1990s, we see, again, a lot of variation. In this case, on the Y-axis, we've just got a measure of antibiotic sensitivity — and I won't go into that. But we've got a lot of variation in antibiotic sensitivity in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, and no trend across the years. But if we look at the end of the 1990s, just half a decade later, we see that in Ecuador they started having a resistance problem. Antibiotic sensitivity was going down. And in Chile, you still had antibiotic sensitivity. So, it looks like Chile dodged two bullets. They got the organism to evolve to mildness, and they got no development of antibiotic resistance. Now, these ideas should apply across the board, as long as you can figure out why some organisms evolved to virulence. And I want to give you just one more example, because we've talked a little bit about malaria. And the example I want to deal with is, or the idea I want to deal with, the question is, what can we do to try to get the malarial organism to evolve to mildness? Now, malaria's transmitted by a mosquito, and normally if you're infected with malaria, and you're feeling sick, it makes it even easier for the mosquito to bite you. And you can show, just by looking at data from literature, that vector-borne diseases are more harmful than non-vector-borne diseases. But I think there's a really fascinating example of what one can do experimentally to try to actually demonstrate this. In the case of waterborne transmission, we'd like to clean up the water supplies, see whether or not we can get those organisms to evolve towards mildness. In the case of malaria, what we'd like to do is mosquito-proof houses. And the logic's a little more subtle here. If you mosquito-proof houses, when people get sick, they're sitting in bed — or in mosquito-proof hospitals, they're sitting in a hospital bed — and the mosquitoes can't get to them. So, if you're a harmful variant in a place where you've got mosquito-proof housing, then you're a loser. The only pathogens that get transmitted are the ones that are infecting people that feel healthy enough to walk outside and get mosquito bites. So, if you were to mosquito proof houses, you should be able to get these organisms to evolve to mildness. And there's a really wonderful experiment that was done that suggests that we really should go ahead and do this. And that experiment was done in Northern Alabama. Just to give you a little perspective on this, I've given you a star at the intellectual center of the United States, which is right there in Louisville, Kentucky. And this really cool experiment was done about 200 miles south of there, in Northern Alabama, by the Tennessee Valley Authority. They had dammed up the Tennessee River. They'd caused the water to back up, they needed electric, hydroelectric power. And when you get stagnant water, you get mosquitoes. They found in the late '30s — 10 years after they'd made these dams — that the people in Northern Alabama were infected with malaria, about a third to half of them were infected with malaria. This shows you the positions of some of these dams. OK, so the Tennessee Valley Authority was in a little bit of a bind. There wasn't DDT, there wasn't chloroquines: what do they do? Well, they decided to mosquito proof every house in Northern Alabama. So they did. They divided Northern Alabama into 11 zones, and within three years, about 100 dollars per house, they mosquito proofed every house. And these are the data. Every row across here represents one of those 11 zones. And the asterisks represent the time at which the mosquito proofing was complete. And so what you can see is that just the mosquito-proofed housing, and nothing else, caused the eradication of malaria. And this was, incidentally, published in 1949, in the leading textbook of malaria, called "Boyd's Malariology." But almost no malaria experts even know it exists. This is important, because it tells us that if you have moderate biting densities, you can eradicate malaria by mosquito proofing houses. Now, I would suggest that you could do this in a lot of places. Like, you know, just as you get into the malaria zone, sub-Saharan Africa. But as you move to really intense biting rate areas, like Nigeria, you're certainly not going to eradicate. But that's when you should be favoring evolution towards mildness. So to me, it's an experiment that's waiting to happen, and if it confirms the prediction, then we should have a very powerful tool. In a way, much more powerful than the kind of tools we're looking at, because most of what's being done today is to rely on things like anti-malarial drugs. And we know that, although it's great to make those anti-malarial drugs available at really low cost and high frequency, we know that when you make them highly available you're going to get resistance to those drugs. And so it's a short-term solution. This is a long-term solution. What I'm suggesting here is that we could get evolution working in the direction we want it to go, rather than always having to battle evolution as a problem that stymies our efforts to control the pathogen, for example with anti-malarial drugs. So, this table I've given just to emphasize that I've only talked about two examples. But as I said earlier, this kind of logic applies across the board for infectious diseases, and it ought to. Because when we're dealing with infectious diseases, we're dealing with living systems. We're dealing with living systems; we're dealing with systems that evolve. And so if you do something with those systems, they're going to evolve one way or another. And all I'm saying is that we need to figure out how they'll evolve, so that — we need to adjust our interventions to get the most bang for the intervention buck, so that we can get these organisms to evolve in the direction we want them to go. So, I don't really have time to talk about those things, but I did want to put them up there, just to give you a sense that there really are solutions to controlling the evolution of harmfulness of some of the nasty pathogens that we're confronted with. And this links up with a lot of the other ideas that have been talked about. So, for example, earlier today there was discussion of, how do you really lower sexual transmission of HIV? What this emphasizes is that we need to figure out how it will work. Will it maybe get lowered if we alter the economy of the area? It may get lowered if we intervene in ways that encourage people to stay more faithful to partners, and so on. But the key thing is to figure out how to lower it, because if we lower it, we'll get an evolutionary change in the virus. And the data really do support this: that you actually do get the virus evolving towards mildness. And that will just add to the effectiveness of our control efforts. So the other thing I really like about this, besides the fact that it brings a whole new dimension into the study of control of disease, is that often the kinds of interventions that you want, that it indicates should be done, are the kinds of interventions that people want anyhow. But people just haven't been able to justify the cost. So, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. If we know that we're going to get extra bang for the buck from providing clean water, then I think that we can say, let's push the effort into that aspect of the control, so that we can actually solve the problem, even though, if you just look at the frequency of infection, you would suggest that you can't solve the problem well enough just by cleaning up water supply. Anyhow, I'll end that there, and thank you very much. (Applause)

Juggling as art ... and science

Michael Moschen

{0: 'Michael Moschen'}

{0: ['juggler']}

{0: 'Quite simply, Michael Moschen has revolutionized juggling, refining it into an art and a bit of a science. With a few flying balls and well-chosen props he will completely re-wire your notions of the physically possible.'}

2002-03-03

2008-05-08

TED2002

en

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

['MacArthur grant', 'dance', 'entertainment', 'math', 'music', 'physics', 'sports']

{162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 267: 'Moving sculpture', 24: 'A dance of "Symbiosis"', 230: '5 predictions, from 1984', 246: 'Inventing instruments that unlock new music', 23936: 'How to read music'}

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

Michael Moschen puts on a quietly mesmerizing show of juggling. Don't think juggling is an art? You might just change your mind after watching Moschen in motion.

I started juggling a long time ago, but long before that, I was a golfer, and that's what I was, a golfer. And as a golfer and as a kid, one of the things that really sort of seeped into my pores, that I sort of lived my whole life, is process. And it's the process of learning things. One of the great things was that my father was an avid golfer, but he was lefty. And he had a real passion for golf, and he also created this whole mythology about Ben Hogan and various things. Well, I learned a lot about interesting things that I knew nothing about at the time, but grew to know stuff about. And that was the mythology of skill. So, one of the things that I love to do is to explore skill. And since Richard put me on this whole thing with music — I'm supposed to actually be doing a project with Tod Machover with the MIT Media Lab — it relates a lot to music. But Tod couldn't come and the project is sort of somewhere, I'm not sure whether it's happening the way we thought, or not. But I'm going to explore skill, and juggling, and basically visual music, I guess. OK, you can start the music, thanks. (Music) (Applause) Thanks. Thank you. Now, juggling can be a lot of fun; play with skill and play with space, play with rhythm. And you can turn the mike on now. I'm going to do a couple of pieces. I do a big piece in a triangle and these are three sections from it. Part of the challenge was to try to understand rhythm and space using not just my hands — because a lot of juggling is hand-oriented — but using the rhythm of my body and feet, and controlling the balls with my feet. (Applause) Thanks. Now, this next section was an attempt to explore space. You see, I think Richard said something about people that are against something. Well, a lot of people think jugglers defy gravity or do stuff. Well, I kind of, from my childhood and golf and all that, it's a process of joining with forces. And so what I'd like to do is try to figure out how to join with the space through the technique. So juggling gravity — up, down. If you figure out what up and down really are, it's a complex physical set of skills to be able to throw a ball down and up and everything, but then you add in sideways. (Applause) Now, I look at it somewhat as a way — when you learn juggling what you learn is how to feel with your eyes, and see with your hands because you're not looking at your hands, you're looking at where the balls are or you're looking at the audience. So this next part is really a way of understanding space and rhythm, with the obvious reference to the feet, but it's also time — where the feet were, where the balls were. (Applause) Thanks. So, visual music: rhythm and complexity. I'm going to build towards complexity now. Juggling three balls is simple and normal. (Laughter) Excuse me. (Laughter) We're jugglers, OK. And remember, you're transposing, you're getting into a subculture here. (Laughter) And juggling — the balls cross and all that. OK, if you keep them in their assigned paths you get parallel lines of different heights, but then hopefully even rhythm. And you can change the rhythm — good, Michael. You can change the rhythm, if you get out of the lights. OK? Change the rhythm, so it's even. Or you can go back and change the height. Now, skill. But you're boxed in, if you can only do it up and down that way. So, you've got to go after the space down there. OK, then you've got to combine them, because then you have the whole spatial palette in front of you. And then you get crazy. (Applause) Now, I'm actually going to ask you to try something, so you've got to pay attention. Complexity: if you spend enough time doing something, time slows down or your skill increases, so your perceptions change. It's learning skills — like being in a high-speed car crash. Things slow down as you learn, as you learn, as you learn. You may not be able to affect it, it almost drifts on you. It goes. But that's the closest approximation I can have to it. So, complexity. Now, how many here are jugglers? OK, so most of you are going to have a similar reaction to this. OK? And whoever laughed there — you understood it completely, right? (Laughter) No, it looks like a mess. It looks like a mess with a guy there, who's got his hands around that mess, OK. Well, that's what juggling is about, right? It's being able to do something that other people can't do or can't understand. All right. So, that's one way of doing it, which is five balls down. OK? Another way is the outside. And you could play with the rhythm. Same pattern. Make it faster and smaller. Make it wider. Make it narrower. Bring it back up. OK. It's done. Thanks. (Applause) Now, what I wanted to get to is that you're all very bright, very tactile. I have no idea how computer-oriented or three-dimensionally-oriented you are, but let's try something. OK, so since you all don't understand what the five-ball pattern is, I'm going to give you a little clue. Enough of a clue? So, you get the pattern, right? OK. (Laughter) You're not getting off that easy. All right? Now, do me a favor: follow the ball that I ask you to follow. Green. Yellow. Pink. White. OK, you can do that? Yeah? OK. Now, let's actually learn something. Actually, let me put you in that area of learning, which is very insecure. You want to do it? Yeah? OK. Hands out in front of you. Palms up, together. What you're going to learn is this. (Laughter) OK? So what I want you to do is just listen to me and do it. Index finger, middle finger, ring, little. Little, ring, middle, index. And then open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. A little bit faster. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. (Laughter) All right. A lot of different learning processes going on in here. (Laughter) One learning process that I see is this — (Laughter) OK. Another learning process that I see is this — (Laughter) OK. So, everybody take a deep breath in, breath out. OK. Now, one more time, and — finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. OK. Shake your hands out. Now, I assume a lot of you spend a lot of time at a computer. OK? So, what you're doing is, you're going la, la, la, and you're getting this. OK? So that's exactly what I'm going to ask you to do, but in a slightly different way. You're going to combine it. So what I want you to do is — fingers. I'll tell you what to do with your fingers, same thing. But I want you to do is also, with your eyes, is follow the colored ball that I ask you to follow. (Laughter) OK? Here we go. So, we're going to start off looking at the white ball — and I'm going to tell you which color, and I'm also going to tell you to go with your fingers. OK? So white ball and — finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Pink. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Green. Finger, finger, finger, finger. Yellow. Finger, finger, finger, pink or finger. Pink, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. All right. (Applause) How did you do? Well? OK. The reason I wanted you to do this is because that's actually what most people face throughout their lives, a moment of learning, a moment of challenge. It's a moment that you can't make sense of. Why the hell should I learn this? OK? Does it really have anything to do with anything in my life? You know, I can't decipher — is it fun? Is it challenging? Am I supposed to cheat? (Laughter) You know, what are you supposed to do? You've got somebody up here who is the operative principle of doing that for his whole life. OK? Trying to figure that stuff out. But is it going to get you anywhere? It's just a moment. That's all it is, a moment. OK? I'm going to change the script for one second. Just let me do this. I don't need music for it. Talking about time in a moment. There's a piece that I recently developed which was all about that, a moment. And what I do as a creative artist is I develop vocabularies or languages of moving objects. What I've done for you here, I developed a lot of those tricks and I put the choreography together, but they're not original techniques. Now, I'm going to start showing you some original techniques that come from the work that I've developed. OK? So, a moment, how would you define a moment? Well, as a juggler, what I wanted to do was create something that was representational of a moment. Ahhh. All right, I'm going to get on my knees and do it. So, a moment. (Rattling) OK? And then, what I did as a juggler was say, OK, what can I do to make that something that is dependent on something else, another dynamic. (Rattling) So, a moment. (Rattling) Another moment. (Rattling) Excuse me, still getting there. A moment that travels. (Rattling) A moment — no, we'll try that again. It separates, and comes back together. Time. How can you look at time? And what do you dedicate it to, in exploring a particular thing? Well, obviously, there's something in here, and you can all have a guess as to what it is. There's a mystery. There's a mystery in the moment. And it has to settle. And then it's dependent on something else. And then it comes to rest. Just a little thing about time. Now, this has expanded into a much bigger piece, because I use ramps of different parabolas that I roll the balls on while I'm keeping time with this. But I just thought I'd talk about a moment. (Applause) All right. OK. Can we show the video of the triangle? Are we ready to do that? Yes? This is the piece that I told you about. It's a much bigger piece that I do exploring the space of a geometric triangle. (Applause) Thanks. The only thing I'll say about the last session is, you ever try juggling and driving the car with your knees at 120 miles an hour? (Laughter) The only other thing is, it was a real shock. I always drove motorcycles. And when I bought my first car, it shocked me that it cost three times more than my parents' house. Interesting. Anyway, balance: constant movement to find an approach to stillness. Cheating. (Laughter) Balance: making up the rules so you can't cheat, so you learn to approach stillness with different parts of your body. To have a conversation with it. To speak. To listen. (Laughter) Hup. Now, it's dependent on rhythm, and keeping a center of balance. When it falls, going underneath. So, there's a rhythm to it. The rhythm can get much smaller. As your skill increases, you learn to find those tinier spaces, those tinier movements. Thanks. (Applause) Now, I'm going to show you the beginnings of a piece that is about balance in some ways, and also — oh, actually, if you're bored, not here, here's one use for it. (Laughter) You can go with the "Sticks One" music. (Music) (Applause) Thanks. That has a certain kind of balance to it, which is all about plumb. I apprenticed with a carpenter and learned about plumb, square and level. And they influenced that, and this next piece, which I'll do a little segment of. "Two Sticks," you can go with it. Thanks. Which is again exploring space, or the lines in space. (Music) (Applause) Working with space and the lines in space in a different way. Oh, let's see here. (Applause) So, I'll come back to that in a second. But working with one ball, now, what if you attach something to it, or change it. This is a little thing that I made because I really like the idea of curves and balls together. And then creating space and the rhythm of space, using the surface of the balls, the surface of the arms. Just a little toy. Which leads me to the next thing, which is — what have I got here? OK. All right. I'm actually leading up to something, the newest thing that I'm working on. This is not it. This is exploring geometry and the rhythm of shape. (Applause) Now, what I just did was I worked with the mathematics — the diameter and the circumference. Sometimes these pieces are mathematical, in that way that I look at a shape and say, what about if I use this and this and this. Sometimes what happens in life affects my choice of objects that I try to work with. The next piece that I'm going to do — which is the cylinders piece, if you want to get that up — it has to do with cylinder seals from about 5,000 years ago, which were stones with designs that were used to roll over wet clay with all sorts of great designs. I love ceramics and all of that. It's a combination of that, the beauty of that, the shape, and the stories that were involved in it, as well as the fact that they protected the contents. The second influence on this piece came from recycling and looking into a tin can recycling bin and seeing all that beautiful emptiness. So, if you want to go with the music for cylinders. (Music) (Applause) Talking about geometry and everything, if you take the circle and you split it in half — can you run "S-Curve music?" I'm going to do just a short version of it. Circles split in half and rotated, and mythology. (Music) (Applause) Anyway, that piece also has a kinetic sculpture in the middle of it, and I dance around a small stage so — two minutes, just to end? The latest piece that I'm working on — what I love is that I never know what I'm working on, why I'm working on it. They're not ideas, they're instincts. And the latest thing that I'm working on — (Clattering) — is something really — I don't know what it is yet. And that's good. I like not to know for as long as possible. Well, because then it tells me the truth, instead of me imposing the truth. And what it is, is working with both positive and negative space but also with these curves. And what it involves, and I don't know if my hands are too beaten up to do it or not, but I'll do a little bit of it. It initially started off with me stacking these things, bunches of them, and then playing with the sense of space, of filling in the space. And then it started changing, and become folding on themselves. And then changing levels. Because my attempt is to make visual instruments, not to just make — I'll try one other thing. For work in three dimensions, with your perceptions of space and time. Now, I don't know exactly where it's going, but I've got a bit of effort involved in this thing. And it's going to change as I go through it. But I really like it, it feels right. This may not be the right shape, and — look at this shape, and then I'll show you the first design I ever put to it, just to see, just to play, because I love all different kinds of things to play with. Let's see here. To work with the positive and negative in a different way. And to change, and to change. So, I'm off in my new direction with this to explore rhythm and space. We'll see what I come up with. Thanks for having me. (Applause)

A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows

Joshua Klein

{0: 'Joshua Klein'}

{0: ['hacker']}

{0: 'Joshua Klein is a fervent hacker of all things, including wet, pulpy systems like animals and people and the way they behave.'}

2008-03-03

2008-05-13

TED2008

en

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

['animals', 'design', 'hack', 'intelligence', 'interface design', 'technology']

{259: 'Can we domesticate germs?', 258: '6 ways mushrooms can save the world', 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 9951: "3 myths about the future of work (and why they're not true)", 7060: "Success stories from Kenya's first makerspace", 2243: 'What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?'}

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

Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant thought experiment: a machine that could form a new bond between animal and human.

How many of you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock film "The Birds"? Any of you get really freaked out by that? You might want to leave now. (Laughter) So this is a vending machine for crows. Over the past few days, many of you have been asking, "How did you come to this? How did you get started doing this?" It started, as with many great ideas, or many ideas you can't get rid of, anyway, at a cocktail party. About 10 years ago, I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine. We were sitting there, and he was complaining about the crows that were all over his yard and making a big mess. And he was telling me we ought to eradicate these things, kill them, because they're making a mess. I said that was stupid, maybe we should just train them to do something useful. And he said that was impossible. And I'm sure I'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying, when someone tells you it's impossible. So I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time. (Laughter) And after 10 years of this, my wife said, "You've got to do this thing you've been talking about, and build the vending machine." So I did. But part of the reason I found this interesting is, I started noticing that we're very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet as a result of human habitation expansion, and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living; they're surviving. And I'm talking specifically about synanthropic species, which have adapted specifically for human ecologies, species like rats and cockroaches and crows. And as I started looking at them, I was finding that they had hyper-adapted. They'd become extremely adept at living with us. And in return, we just tried to kill them all the time. (Laughter) And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. We were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways. So, for example, rats are incredibly responsive breeders. And cockroaches, as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows, have become really immune to the poisons that we're using. So I thought, let's build something that's mutually beneficial; something that we can both benefit from, and find some way to make a new relationship with these species. So I built the vending machine. But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows. It turns out, crows aren't just surviving with human beings; they're actually thriving. They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic and the southern tip of South America. And in all that area, they're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers away from human beings. So we may not think about them, but they're always around. And not surprisingly, given the human population growth, more than half of the human population is living in cities now. And out of those, nine-tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities. We're seeing a population boom with crows. So bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers. So that's no great surprise. But what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way. And I'll give you an example of that. This is Betty. She's a New Caledonian crow. And these crows use sticks in the wild to get insects and whatnot out of pieces of wood. Here, she's trying to get a piece of meat out of a tube. But the researchers had a problem. They messed up and left just a stick of wire in there. And she hadn't had the opportunity to do this before. You see, it wasn't working very well. So she adapted. Now, this is completely unprompted; she had never seen this done before. No one taught her to bend this into a hook or had shown her how it could happen. But she did it all on her own. So keep in mind — she's never seen this done. (Laughter) Right. (Laughter) Yeah. All right. (Applause) So that's the part where the researchers freak out. (Laughter) It turns out, we've been finding more and more that crows are really intelligent. Their brains are in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are. There's all kinds of anecdotes for the different kinds of intelligence they have. For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. And when the fishermen move off, the crows fly down, reel up the lines, and eat the fish or the bait. It's pretty annoying for the fishermen. On an entirely different tack, at University of Washington a few years ago, they were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus. Some students went out, netted some crows, brought them in, weighed and measured them, and let them back out again. And they were entertained to discover that for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them and run around, and make their life kind of miserable. (Laughter) They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week. And the next month. And after summer break. Until they finally graduated and left campus, and — glad to get away, I'm sure — came back sometime later, and found the crows still remembered them. (Laughter) So, the moral being: don't piss off crows. So now, students at the University of Washington that are studying these crows, do so with a giant wig and a big mask. (Laughter) It's fairly interesting. (Laughter) So we know these crows are really smart, but the more I dug into this, the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation. Video: Crows have become highly skilled at making a living in these new urban environments. In this Japanese city, they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can't manage: drop it among the traffic. The problem now is collecting the bits, without getting run over. Wait for the light to stop the traffic. Then, collect your cracked nut in safety. (Laughter) (Applause) Joshua Klein: Yeah, pretty interesting. What's significant about this isn't that crows are using cars to crack nuts. In fact, that's old hat for crows. This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City, at a driving school in the suburbs of Tokyo. And since that time, all the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior. Now every crow within five kilometers is standing by a sidewalk, waiting to collect its lunch. So they're learning from each other. And research bears this out. Parents seem to be teaching their young. They learn from their peers, they learn from their enemies. If I have a little extra time, I'll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely. The point being, they've developed cultural adaptation. And as we heard yesterday, that's the Pandora's box that's getting human beings in trouble, and we're starting to see it with them. They're able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city. So we know that there's lots of crows. We found out they're really smart and they can teach each other. When all this became clear, I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine. So that's what we did. This is a vending machine for crows. And it uses Skinnerian training to shape their behavior over four stages. It's pretty simple. Basically, what happens is that we put this out in a field or someplace where there's lots of crows. We put coins and peanuts all around the base of the machine. Crows eventually come by, eat the peanuts, and get used to the machine being there. Eventually, they eat all the peanuts. Then they see peanuts here on the feeder tray, and hop up and help themselves. Then they leave, the machine spits up more coins and peanuts, and life is dandy if you're a crow — you can come back anytime and get yourself a peanut. So when they get really used to that, we move on to the crows coming back. Now they're used to the sound of the machine; they keep coming back and digging out peanuts from the pile of coins that's there. When they get really happy about this, we stymie them. We move to the third stage, where we only give them a coin. Now, like most of us who have gotten used to a good thing, this really pisses them off. So they do what they do in nature when they're looking for something: sweep things out of the way with their beak. They do that here, and that knocks the coins down the slot. When that happens, they get a peanut. This goes on for some time. The crows learn that all they have to do is show up, wait for the coin to come out, put it in the slot, then get their peanut. When they're good and comfortable with that, we move to the final stage, where they show up and nothing happens. This is where we see the difference between crows and other animals. Squirrels, for example, would show up, look for the peanut, go away. Come back, look for the peanut, go away. They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored, and then they go off and play in traffic. Crows, on the other hand, show up and they try and figure it out. They know this machine has been messing with them through three different stages of behavior. (Laughter) They figure there must be more to it. So they poke at it and peck at it. And eventually some crow gets a bright idea: "Hey, there's lots of coins lying around from the first stage, hops down, picks it up, drops it in the slot, and we're off to the races. That crow enjoys a temporary monopoly on peanuts, until his friends figure out how to do it, and then there we go. So, what's significant about this to me isn't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. Mind you, there's 216 million dollars' worth of change lost every year, but I'm not sure I can depend on that ROI from crows. (Laughter) Instead, I think we should look a little bit larger. I think crows can be trained to do other things. For example, why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events? Or find expensive components from discarded electronics? Or maybe do search and rescue? The main point of all this for me is, we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. We can find ways to interact with these other species that doesn't involve exterminating them, but involves finding an equilibrium with them that's a useful balance. Thanks very much. (Applause)

How the news distorts our worldview

Alisa Miller

{0: 'Alisa Miller'}

{0: ['ceo', 'public radio international (pri)']}

{0: 'As the CEO of Public Radio International, Alisa Miller works to bring the most significant news stories to millions -- empowering Americans with the knowledge to make choices in an interconnected world.'}

2008-03-03

2008-05-14

TED2008

en

['af', 'am', 'ar', 'az', 'bg', 'bi', 'ca', 'cs', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'ka', 'kk', 'ko', 'lt', 'mn', 'my', 'nb', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'th', 'tr', 'uk', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['Google', 'business', 'economics', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'media', 'news']

{92: "The best stats you've ever seen", 75: 'Why we should invest in a free press', 279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 24078: 'How to choose your news', 45837: "How we're helping local reporters turn important stories into national news", 916: 'Listening to global voices'}

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

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the media is actually showing us less. Eye-opening stats and graphs.

How does the news shape the way we see the world? Here's the world based on the way it looks — based on landmass. And here's how news shapes what Americans see. This map — (Applause) — this map shows the number of seconds that American network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories, by country, in February of 2007 — just one year ago. Now, this was a month when North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities. There was massive flooding in Indonesia. And in Paris, the IPCC released its study confirming man's impact on global warming. The U.S. accounted for 79 percent of total news coverage. And when we take out the U.S. and look at the remaining 21 percent, we see a lot of Iraq — that's that big green thing there — and little else. The combined coverage of Russia, China and India, for example, reached just one percent. When we analyzed all the news stories and removed just one story, here's how the world looked. What was that story? The death of Anna Nicole Smith. This story eclipsed every country except Iraq, and received 10 times the coverage of the IPCC report. And the cycle continues; as we all know, Britney has loomed pretty large lately. So, why don't we hear more about the world? One reason is that news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half. Aside from one-person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi, New Delhi and Mumbai, there are no network news bureaus in all of Africa, India or South America — places that are home to more than two billion people. The reality is that covering Britney is cheaper. And this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news. Local TV news looms large, and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news. And what about the web? The most popular news sites don't do much better. Last year, Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News' front page. And they, in fact, covered the same 24 news events. Similarly, a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it. So, if you put it all together, this could help explain why today's college graduates, as well as less educated Americans, know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago. And if you think it's simply because we are not interested, you would be wrong. In recent years, Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent. The real question: is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world? I know we can do better. And can we afford not to? Thank you.

What's wrong with what we eat

Mark Bittman

{0: 'Mark Bittman'}

{0: ['food writer']}

{0: 'Mark Bittman is a bestselling cookbook author, journalist and television personality. His friendly, informal approach to home cooking has shown millions that fancy execution is no substitute for flavor and soul.'}

2007-12-12

2008-05-15

EG 2007

en

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['environment', 'food', 'green', 'obesity', 'sustainability', 'Best of the Web']

{348: "What's wrong with school lunches", 214: "A plant's-eye view", 10: "The killer American diet that's sweeping the planet", 1565: 'The global food waste scandal', 1304: 'Cooking as alchemy', 650: 'How food shapes our cities'}

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

In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what's wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it's putting the entire planet at risk.

I write about food. I write about cooking. I take it quite seriously, but I'm here to talk about something that's become very important to me in the last year or two. It is about food, but it's not about cooking, per se. I'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow. I'm not a vegetarian — this is the old Nixon line, right? But I still think that this — (Laughter) — may be this year's version of this. Now, that is only a little bit hyperbolic. And why do I say it? Because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined. There was the bomb, and there's now. And where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives, but whether, if we could see the Earth a century from now, we'd recognize it. It's a holocaust of a different kind, and hiding under our desks isn't going to help. Start with the notion that global warming is not only real, but dangerous. Since every scientist in the world now believes this, and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to, we can take this is a given. Then hear this, please. After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production — more than transportation. Now, you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts, but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2, and it's not just methane. Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation, air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity. There's more. Like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people, but to animals. But lists like this become kind of numbing, so let me just say this: if you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green, or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian. Now, I'm no more anti-cattle than I am anti-atom, but it's all in the way we use these things. There's another piece of the puzzle, which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday, and one you already know. There's no question, none, that so-called lifestyle diseases — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers — are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world. And that's the direct result of eating a Western diet. Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates — the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day — our demand for these things, not our need, our want, drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us. And those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease. Now global warming was unforeseen. We didn't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility. Maybe a few lung diseases here and there, but, you know, that's not such a big deal. The current health crisis, however, is a little more the work of the evil empire. We were told, we were assured, that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate, the healthier we'd be. No. Overconsumption of animals, and of course, junk food, is the problem, along with our paltry consumption of plants. Now, there's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here, but the evidence is that plants — and I want to make this clear — it's not the ingredients in plants, it's the plants. It's not the beta-carotene, it's the carrot. The evidence is very clear that plants promote health. This evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer. Not bad. But back to animals and junk food. What do they have in common? One: we don't need either of them for health. We don't need animal products, and we certainly don't need white bread or Coke. Two: both have been marketed heavily, creating unnatural demand. We're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles. Three: their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and Earth-friendly diet. Now, let's imagine a parallel. Let's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy, while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy, knowing all the while that the result would be pollution, war and rising costs. Incredible, isn't it? Yet they do that. And they do this here. It's the same deal. The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness. So, when the USDA finally acknowledged that it was plants, rather than animals, that made people healthy, they encouraged us, via their overly simplistic food pyramid, to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, along with more carbs. What they didn't tell us is that some carbs are better than others, and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food. But industry lobbyists would never let that happen. And guess what? Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness. So, instead of substituting plants for animals, our swollen appetites simply became larger, and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged. So-called low-fat diets, so-called low-carb diets — these are not solutions. But with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local, or whether we're being nice to animals, the most important issues just aren't being addressed. Now, don't get me wrong. I like animals, and I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well, when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. That's our number. 10 billion. If you strung all of them — chickens, cows, pigs and lambs — to the moon, they'd go there and back five times, there and back. Now, my math's a little shaky, but this is pretty good, and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long, but you get the idea. That's just the United States. And with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease, kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of the animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left. Another red herring might be exemplified by the word "locavore," which was just named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Seriously. And locavore, for those of you who don't know, is someone who eats only locally grown food — which is fine if you live in California, but for the rest of us it's a bit of a sad joke. Between the official story — the food pyramid — and the hip locavore vision, you have two versions of how to improve our eating. (Laughter). They both get it wrong, though. The first at least is populist, and the second is elitist. How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States. And I'm going to go through that, at least the last hundred years or so, very quickly right now. A hundred years ago, guess what? Everyone was a locavore: even New York had pig farms nearby, and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion. Every family had a cook, usually a mom. And those moms bought and prepared food. It was like your romantic vision of Europe. Margarine didn't exist. In fact, when margarine was invented, several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink, so we'd all know that it was a fake. There was no snack food, and until the '20s, until Clarence Birdseye came along, there was no frozen food. There were no restaurant chains. There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people, but none of them would think to open another one. Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic. And fancy food was entirely French. As an aside, those of you who remember Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide. (Laughter) Back in those days, before even Julia, back in those days, there was no philosophy of food. You just ate. You didn't claim to be anything. There was no marketing. There were no national brands. Vitamins had not been invented. There were no health claims, at least not federally sanctioned ones. Fats, carbs, proteins — they weren't bad or good, they were food. You ate food. Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient, because it was an ingredient. The cornflake hadn't been invented. (Laughter) The Pop-Tart, the Pringle, Cheez Whiz, none of that stuff. Goldfish swam. (Laughter) It's hard to imagine. People grew food, and they ate food. And again, everyone ate local. In New York, an orange was a common Christmas present, because it came all the way from Florida. From the '30s on, road systems expanded, trucks took the place of railroads, fresh food began to travel more. Oranges became common in New York. The South and West became agricultural hubs, and in other parts of the country, suburbs took over farmland. The effects of this are well known. They are everywhere. And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle, as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato, even in summer. Eventually, California produced too much food to ship fresh, so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods. Thus arrived convenience. It was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework. Now, I know everybody over the age of, like 45 — their mouths are watering at this point. (Laughter) (Applause) If we had a slide of Salisbury steak, even more so, right? (Laughter) But this may have cut down on housework, but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well. Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad. I, for one — and I'm not kidding — didn't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19. Who needed it though? Meat was everywhere. What could be easier, more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak? But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally. Rather than spending their lives eating grass, for which their stomachs were designed, they were forced to eat soy and corn. They have trouble digesting those grains, of course, but that wasn't a problem for producers. New drugs kept them healthy. Well, they kept them alive. Healthy was another story. Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. Listen to this, between 1950 and 2000, the world's population doubled. Meat consumption increased five-fold. Now, someone had to eat all that stuff, so we got fast food. And this took care of the situation resoundingly. Home cooking remained the norm, but its quality was down the tubes. There were fewer meals with home-cooked breads, desserts and soups, because all of them could be bought at any store. Not that they were any good, but they were there. Most moms cooked like mine: a piece of broiled meat, a quickly made salad with bottled dressing, canned soup, canned fruit salad. Maybe baked or mashed potatoes, or perhaps the stupidest food ever, Minute Rice. For dessert, store-bought ice cream or cookies. My mom is not here, so I can say this now. This kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself. (Laughter) It wasn't all bad. By the '70s, forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients. We tended gardens, we became interested in organic food, we knew or we were vegetarians. We weren't all hippies, either. Some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well. Meanwhile, food production had become industrial. Industrial. Perhaps because it was being produced rationally, as if it were plastic, food gained magical or poisonous powers, or both. Many people became fat-phobic. Others worshiped broccoli, as if it were God-like. But mostly they didn't eat broccoli. Instead they were sold on yogurt, yogurt being almost as good as broccoli. Except, in reality, the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream. Similarly, let's look at a granola bar. You think that that might be healthy food, but in fact, if you look at the ingredient list, it's closer in form to a Snickers than it is to oatmeal. Sadly, it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma, if not actually killed — the beginning of the heyday of value-added food, which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it. Think of the frozen chicken nugget. The chicken is fed corn, and then its meat is ground up, and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder, and then it's fried in corn oil. All you do is nuke it. What could be better? And zapped horribly, pathetically. By the '70s, home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like McNuggets and Hot Pockets — and we all have our favorites, actually — made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home. At the same time, masses of women were entering the workforce, and cooking simply wasn't important enough for men to share the burden. So now, you've got your pizza nights, you've got your microwave nights, you've got your grazing nights, you've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on. Leading the way — what's leading the way? Meat, junk food, cheese: the very stuff that will kill you. So, now we clamor for organic food. That's good. And as evidence that things can actually change, you can now find organic food in supermarkets, and even in fast-food outlets. But organic food isn't the answer either, at least not the way it's currently defined. Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic, when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth? And if that salmon's from Chile, and it's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles, whatever, dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere? I don't know. Packed in Styrofoam, of course, before landing somewhere in the United States, and then being trucked a few hundred more miles. This may be organic in letter, but it's surely not organic in spirit. Now here is where we all meet. The locavores, the organivores, the vegetarians, the vegans, the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food. Even though we've come to this from different points, we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food. We need to start acting. And this is not only an issue of social justice, as Ann Cooper said — and, of course, she's completely right — but it's also one of global survival. Which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue, the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food. As I said, 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production. How much livestock do you need to produce this? 70 percent of the agricultural land on Earth, 30 percent of the Earth's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we'll eat. And this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so. And if the numbers coming in from China are anything like what they look like now, it's not going to be 40 years. There is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do. And I say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life. The most common argument is that we need nutrients — even though we eat, on average, twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed USDA recommends. But listen: experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week. What do you think we eat per day? Half a pound. But don't we need meat to be big and strong? Isn't meat eating essential to health? Won't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless, sissy, liberals? (Laughter) Some of us might think that would be a good thing. But, no, even if we were all steroid-filled football players, the answer is no. In fact, there's no diet on Earth that meets basic nutritional needs that won't promote growth, and many will make you much healthier than ours does. We don't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition, we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition, and it's killing us. To suggest that in the interests of personal and human health Americans eat 50 percent less meat — it's not enough of a cut, but it's a start. It would seem absurd, but that's exactly what should happen, and what progressive people, forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating, along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants. I've been writing about food more or less omnivorously — one might say indiscriminately — for about 30 years. During that time, I've eaten and recommended eating just about everything. I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly. Ann Cooper's right. The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone — and that's the hard part — but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants. It's a simple formula: eat food. Eat real food. We can continue to enjoy our food, and we continue to eat well, and we can eat even better. We can continue the search for the ingredients we love, and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals. We'll reduce not only calories, but our carbon footprint. We can make food more important, not less, and save ourselves by doing so. We have to choose that path. Thank you.

The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean

Robert Ballard

{0: 'Robert Ballard'}

{0: ['oceanographer']}

{0: 'On more than 120 deep-sea expeditions, Robert Ballard has made many major natural discoveries, such as the deep-sea vents. Oh, and he found the Titanic.'}

2008-02-29

2008-05-20

TED2008

en

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

['adventure', 'animals', 'biodiversity', 'education', 'exploration', 'fish', 'oceans', 'science', 'submarine']

{178: 'This is Saturn', 89: 'Why did I ski to the North Pole?', 141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 926: 'Wiring an interactive ocean', 343: 'Life in the deep oceans', 23912: 'How big is the ocean?'}

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

Ocean explorer Robert Ballard takes us on a mindbending trip to hidden worlds underwater, where he and other researchers are finding unexpected life, resources, even new mountains. He makes a case for serious exploration and mapping. Google Ocean, anyone?

The first question is this. Our country has two exploration programs. One is NASA, with a mission to explore the great beyond, to explore the heavens, which we all want to go to if we're lucky. And you can see we have Sputnik, and we have Saturn, and we have other manifestations of space exploration. Well, there's also another program, in another agency within our government, in ocean exploration. It's in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And my question is this: "why are we ignoring the oceans?" Here's the reason, or not the reason, but here's why I ask that question. If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one-year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years. Why? Why are we looking up? Is it because it's heaven? And hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? Why are people afraid of the ocean? Or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer? I'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72 percent of the planet, so buckle up. OK. And what we're going to do is we're going to immerse ourselves in my world. And what I'm going to try — I hope I make the following points. I'm going to make it right now in case I forget. Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. And most of all, it was not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and all my Earth science books when I was a student — I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap. In today's context, it was a bunch of crap, but it was the law of geology, vertical tectonics. All the things we're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident. Mostly discoveries made by accident. We were looking for something and found something else. And everything we're going to talk about represents a one tenth of one percent glimpse, because that's all we've seen. I have a characterization. This is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water. It gives you the false impression it's a map. It is not a map. In fact, I have another version at my office and I ask people, "Why are there mountains here, on this area here, but there are none over here?" And they go, "Well, gee, I don't know," saying, "Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?" No, no, that's the only place a ship's been. Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing. All right. So we're going to immerse ourselves in the 72 percent of the planet because, you know, it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny put all the resources on the continents. (Laughter) You know, it's just ludicrous. We are always, constantly playing the zero sum game. You know, we're going to do this, we're going to take it away from something else. I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet. And as I will point out later in the presentation, 50 percent of the United States of America lies beneath the sea. 50 percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent. Why? OK. Now, I began my explorations the hard way. Back then — actually my first expedition was when I was 17 years old. It was 49 years ago. Do the math, I'm 66. And I went out to sea on a Scripps ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave, and I was too young to be — you know, I thought it was great! I was a body surfer and I thought, "Wow, that was an incredible wave!" And we almost sank the ship, but I became enraptured with mounting expeditions. And over the last 49 years, I've done about 120, 121 — I keep doing them — expeditions. But in the early days, the only way I could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine, a very small submarine, and go down to the bottom. I dove in a whole series of different deep diving submersibles. Alvin and Sea Cliff and Cyana, and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight. In fact, on a good day, we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the Earth — maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we've got going. And so it's very difficult to get there, if you do it physically. But I was enraptured, and in my graduate years was the dawn of plate tectonics. And we realized that the greatest mountain range on Earth lies beneath the sea. The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball. This is on a Mercator projection. But if you were to put it on an equal area projection, you'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent of the Earth's total surface area. Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet. And our interest in this mountain range, as Earth scientists in those days, was not only because of its tremendous size, dominating the planet, but the role it plays in the genesis of the Earth's outer skin. Because it's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crustal plates are separating. And like a living organism, you tear it open, it bleeds its molten blood, rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue and moves laterally. But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation as we call it — into the Rift Valley — until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974 and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley. We went down into the Rift Valley. This is all accurate except for one thing — it's pitch black. It's absolutely pitch black, because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean, which is 12,000 feet. In the Rift Valley, it's 9,000 feet. Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun. Most of our planet is in eternal darkness. And for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea. And with the absence of photosynthesis you have no plant life, and as a result, you have very little animal life living in this underworld. Or so we thought. And so in our initial explorations, we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation, looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles. Running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. Tens of thousands of active volcanoes. There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. So, it's a phenomenally active region, it's not just a dark, boring place. It's a very alive place. And it's then being ripped open. But we were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then. We couldn't understand why you had a mountain under tension. In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide, it made sense: they would crush into one another, you would thicken the crust, you'd uplift it. That's why you get, you know, you get seashells up on Mount Everest. It's not a flood, it was pushed up there. We understood mountains under compression, but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension. It should not be. Until one of my colleagues said, "It looks to me like a thermal blister, and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve." We said, "Let's go find out." We punched a bunch of heat probes. Everything made sense, except, at the axis, there was missing heat. It was missing heat. It was hot. It wasn't hot enough. So, we came up with multiple hypotheses: there's little green people down there taking it; there's all sorts of things going on. But the only logical [explanation] was that there were hot springs. So, there must be underwater hot springs. We mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat. And so we went along this mountain range, in an area along Galapagos Rift, and did we find the missing heat. It was amazing. These giant chimneys, huge giant chimneys. We went up to them with our submersible. We wanted to get a temperature probe, we stuck it in there, looked at it — it pegged off scale. The pilot made this great observation: "That's hot." (Laughter) And then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff — it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature was 650 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead. This is what a real one looks like, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. What you're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean. Everything you see in this picture is commercial grade: copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. So the Easter Bunny has put things in the ocean floor, and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we're making in this mountain range. We're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore along this mountain range, but it was dwarfed by what we discovered. We discovered a profusion of life, in a world that it should not exist [in]. Giant tube worms, 10 feet tall. I remember having to use vodka — my own vodka — to pickle it because we don't carry formaldehyde. We went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock. Large clams, and when we opened them, they didn't look like a clam. And when we cut them open, they didn't have the anatomy of a clam. No mouth, no gut, no digestive system. Their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, through a process we now call chemosynthesis. None of it in our textbooks. None of this in our textbooks. We did not know about this life system. We were not predicting it. We stumbled on it, looking for some missing heat. So, we wanted to accelerate this process. We wanted to get away from this silly trip, up and down on a submarine: average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet; two and half hours to get to work in the morning; two and half hours to get to home. Five hour commute to work. Three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled — one mile. (Laughter) On a 42,000 mile mountain range. Great job security, but not the way to go. So, I began designing a new technology of telepresence, using robotic systems to replicate myself, so I wouldn't have to cycle my vehicle system. We began to introduce that in our explorations, and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another. The scientists were off watch and they came across incredible life forms. They came across new creatures they had not seen before. But more importantly, they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand. That did not make sense. They were not above a magma chamber. They shouldn't be there. And we called it Lost City. And Lost City was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside down pools. Look at that. How do you do that? That's water upside down. We went in underneath and tapped it, and we found that it had the pH of Drano. The pH of 11, and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it and at this extreme environment. And the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment. All the way at the other end, in an alkaline environment, at a pH of 11, life existed. So life was much more creative than we had ever thought. Again, discovered by accident. Just two years ago working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems. This was two miles from where people go to sunbathe, and they were oblivious to the existence of this system. Again, you know, we stop at the water's edge. Recently, diving off — in the Gulf of Mexico, finding pools of water, this time not upside down, right side up. Bingo. You'd think you're in air, until a fish swims by. You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs. Near that was methane. I've never seen volcanoes of methane. Instead of belching out lava, they were belching out big, big bubbles of methane. And they were creating these volcanoes, and there were flows, not of lava, but of the mud coming out of the Earth but driven by — I've never seen this before. Moving on, there's more than just natural history beneath the sea — human history. Our discoveries of the Titanic. The realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. It contains more history than all of the museums on land combined. And yet we're only now penetrating it. Finding the state of preservation. We found the Bismarck in 16,000 feet. We then found the Yorktown. People always ask, "Did you find the right ship?" It said Yorktown on the stern. (Laughter) More recently, finding ancient history. How many ancient mariners have had a bad day? The number's a million. We've been discovering these along ancient trade routes, where they're not supposed to be. This shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of Christ. This one sank carrying a prefabricated, Home Depot Roman temple. And then here's one that sank at the time of Homer, at 750 B.C. More recently, into the Black Sea, where we're exploring. Because there's no oxygen there, it's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved. All their organics are perfectly preserved. We begin to excavate them. We expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition with their DNA. Look at the state of preservation — still the ad mark of a carpenter. Look at the state of those artifacts. You still see the beeswax dripping. When they dropped, they sealed it. This ship sank 1,500 years ago. Fortunately, we've been able to convince Congress. We begin to go on the Hill and lobby. And we stole recently a ship from the United States Navy. The Okeanos Explorer on its mission. Its mission is as good as you could get. Its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth. And I was looking at it yesterday, it's up in Seattle. OK. (Applause) It comes online this summer, and it begins its journey of exploration. But we have no idea what we're going find when we go out there with our technology. But certainly, it's going to be going to the unknown America. This is that part of the United States that lies beneath the sea. We own all of that blue and yet, like I say, particularly the western territorial trust, we don't have maps of them. We don't have maps of them. We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trust. The way we're going to run this — we have no idea what we're going to discover. We have no idea what we're going to discover. We're going to discover an ancient shipwreck, a Phoenician off Brazil, or a new rock formation, a new life. So, we're going to run it like an emergency hospital. We're going to connect our command center, via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we're building at the University of Rhode Island, called the Interspace Center. And within that, we're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine, blue-gold team, switching them off and on, running 24 hours a day. A discovery is made, that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later. But then it's connected through Internet too — the new Internet highway that makes Internet one look like a dirt road on the information highway — with 10 gigabits of bandwidth. We'll go into areas we have no knowledge of. It's a big blank sheet on our planet. We'll map it within hours, have the maps disseminated out to the major universities. It turns out that 90 percent of all the oceanographic intellect in this country are at 12 universities. They're all on I-2. We can then build a command center. This is a remote center at the University of Washington. She's talking to the pilot. She's 5,000 miles away, but she's assumed command. But the beauty of this, too, is we can then disseminate it to children. We can disseminate. They can follow this expedition. I've started a program — where are you Jim? Jim Young who helped me start a program called the Jason Project. More recently, we've started a program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, so that we can use exploration, and the excitement of live exploration, to motivate them and excite them and then give them what they're already ready for. I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system. (Applause) Because we want to create — we want to create the classroom of tomorrow. We have stiff competition and we need to motivate and it's all being done. You win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade. The game is not over — it's over by the eighth grade, it's not beginning. We need to be not only proud of our universities. We need to be proud of our middle schools. And when we have the best middle schools in the world, we'll have the best kids pumped out of that system, let me tell you. Because this is what we want. This is what we want. This is a young lady, not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game. Watching exploration live from thousands of miles away, and it's just dawning on her what she's seeing. And when you get a jaw drop, you can inform. You can put so much information into that mind, it's in full [receiving] mode. (Applause) This, I hope, will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for truth. And my final question, my final question — why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars, and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon, but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet? And the technology is at hand. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Designing objects that tell stories

Yves Béhar

{0: 'Yves Béhar'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Yves Béhar is a designer, entrepreneur and avid surfer whose principles for good design have been deeply influential across the field.'}

2008-02-29

2008-05-21

TED2008

en

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

['business', 'computers', 'creativity', 'design', 'sex', 'society']

{27: 'Organic design, inspired by nature', 49: "Behind the design of Seattle's library", 5: 'Great cars are great art', 431: 'Ways of seeing', 207: 'Treat design as art', 372: 'Design and the Elastic Mind'}

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

Designer Yves Béhar digs up his creative roots to discuss some of the iconic objects he's created (the Leaf lamp, the Jawbone headset). Then he turns to the witty, surprising, elegant objects he's working on now -- including the "$100 laptop."

Being a child, and sort of crawling around the house, I remember these Turkish carpets, and there were these scenes, these battle scenes, these love scenes. I mean, look, this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier. And my mom took these pictures actually, last week, of our carpets, and I remember this to this day. There was another object, this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity — pretty scary stuff, when you're a little kid. What I remember today from this is that objects tell stories, so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work. And then there was another influence. I was a teenager, and at 15 or 16, I guess like all teenagers, we want to just do what we love and what we believe in. And so, I fused together the two things I loved the most, which was skiing and windsurfing. Those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in Switzerland. So, I created this compilation of the two: I took my skis and I took a board and I put a mast foot in there, and some foot straps, and some metal fins, and here I was, going really fast on frozen lakes. It was really a death trap. I mean, it was incredible, it worked incredibly well, but it was really dangerous. And I realized then I had to go to design school. (Laughter) I mean, look at those graphics there. (Laughter) So, I went to design school, and it was the early '90s when I finished. And I saw something extraordinary happening in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to be there, and I saw that the computer was coming into our homes, that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes. And so I got myself a job and I was working for a consultancy, and we would get in to these meetings, and these managers would come in, and they would say, "Well, what we're going to do here is really important, you know." And they would give the projects code names, you know, mostly from "Star Wars," actually: things like C3PO, Yoda, Luke. So, in anticipation, I would be this young designer in the back of the room, and I would raise my hand, and I would ask questions. I mean, in retrospect, probably stupid questions, but things like, "What's this Caps Lock key for?" or "What's this Num Lock key for?" You know, that thing? "You know, do people really use it? Do they need it? Do they want it in their homes?" (Laughter) What I realized then is, they didn't really want to change the legacy stuff; they didn't want to change the insides. They were really looking for us, the designers, to create the skins, to put some pretty stuff outside of the box. And I didn't want to be a colorist. It wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be a stylist in this way. And then I saw this quote: "advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal." (Laughter) So, I had to start on my own. So I moved to San Francisco, and I started a little company, fuseproject. And what I wanted to work on is important stuff. And I wanted to really not just work on the skins, but I wanted to work on the entire human experience. And so the first projects were sort of humble, but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way, and maybe finding some new functionality. This is a watch we made for Mini Cooper, the car company, right when it launched, and it's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical. And that allows me to check my timer discretely, here, without bending my elbow. And other projects, which were really about transformation, about matching the human need. This is a little piece of furniture for an Italian manufacturer, and it ships completely flat, and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot. And something a little bit more experimental: this is a light fixture for Swarovski, and what it does is, it changes shape. So, it goes from a circle, to a round, to a square, to a figure eight. And just by drawing on a little computer tablet, the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want. And then finally, the leaf lamp for Herman Miller. This is a pretty involved process; it took us about four and a half years. But I really was looking for creating a unique experience of light, a new experience of light. So, we had to design both the light and the light bulb. And that's a unique opportunity, I would say, in design. And the new experience I was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm, sort of glowing kind of mood light, all the way to a bright work light. So, the light bulb actually does that. It allows the person to switch, and to mix these two colorations. And it's done in a very simple way: one just touches the base of the light, and on one side, you can mix the brightness, and on the other, the coloration of the light. So, all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them, and I think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world, whether it's for business, or, as I'm going to show, on some civic-type projects. Because I think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business, value to the users also, but I think it's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value. And the values we bring can be about environmental issues, about sustainability, about lower power consumption. You know, they can be about function and beauty; they can be about business strategy. But designers are really the glue that brings these things together. So Jawbone is a project that you're familiar with, and it has a humanistic technology. It feels your skin. It rests on your skin, and it knows when it is you're talking. And by knowing when it is you're talking, it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about, which is the environmental noises. But the other thing that is humanistic about Jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff, and all the nerdy stuff out of it, and try to make it as beautiful as we can. I mean, think about it: the care we take in selecting sunglasses, or jewelry, or accessories is really important, so if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face. And this is what we're pursuing here. But how we work on Jawbone is really unique. I want to point at something here, on the left. This is the board, this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work. But this is the design process: there's somebody changing the board, putting tracers on the board, changing the location of the ICs, as the designers on the other side are doing the work. So, it's not about slapping skins, anymore, on a technology. It's really about designing from the inside out. And then, on the other side of the room, the designers are making small adjustments, sketching, drawing by hand, putting it in the computer. And it's what I call being design driven. You know, there is some push and pull, but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out. And then, of course, design is never done. And this is — the other new way that is unique in how we work is, because it's never done, you have to do all this other stuff. The packaging, and the website, and you need to continue to really touch the user, in many ways. But how do you retain somebody, when it's never done? And Hosain Rahman, the CEO of Aliph Jawbone, you know, really understands that you need a different structure. So, in a way, the different structure is that we're partners, it's a partnership. We can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project, and then we also share in the rewards. And here's another project, another partnership-type approach. This is called Y Water, and it's this guy from Los Angeles, Thomas Arndt, Austrian originally, who came to us, and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink, or an organic drink for his kids, to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he's trying to get them away from. So, we worked on this bottle, and it's completely symmetrical in every dimension. And this allows the bottle to turn into a game. The bottles connect together, and you can create different shapes, different forms. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And then while we were doing this, the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a Y, and then we thought, well these words, "why" and "why not," are probably the most important words that kids ask. So we called it Y Water. And so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room: the three-dimensional design, the ideas, the branding, it all becomes deeply connected. And then the other thing about this project is, we bring intellectual property, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff, but I think, at the end of the day, what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with. And it's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor, when others can be creative and do more with it. Here's another project, which I think really emulates that. This is the One Laptop per Child, the $100 laptop. This picture is incredible. In Nigeria, people carry their most precious belongings on their heads. This girl is going to school with a laptop on her head. I mean, to me, it just means so much. But when Nicholas Negroponte — and he has spoken about this project a lot, he's the founder of OLPC — came to us about two and a half years ago, there were some clear ideas. He wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology, and those are pillars of his life, but also pillars of the mission of One Laptop per Child. But the third pillar that he talked about was design. And at the time, I wasn't really working on computers. I didn't really want to, from the previous adventure. But what he said was really significant, is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product, how we were going to make it low cost, robust. And plus, he said he was going to get rid of the Caps Lock key — (Laughter) — and the Num Lock key, too. So, I was convinced. We designed it to be iconic, to look different. To look like it's for a kid, but not like a toy. And then the integration of all these great technologies, which you've heard about, the Wi-Fi antennas that allow the kids to connect; the screen, which you can read in sunlight; the keyboard, which is made out of rubber, and it's protected from the environment. You know, all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the OLPC people and the engineers. They fought the suppliers, they fought the manufacturers. I mean, they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is. And in a way, it is that will that makes projects like this one — allows the process from not destroying the original idea. And I think this is something really important. So, now you get these pictures — you get up in the morning, and you see the kids in Nigeria and you see them in Uruguay with their computers, and in Mongolia. And we went away from obviously the beige. I mean it's colorful, it's fun. In fact, you can see each logo is a little bit different. It's because we were able to run, during the manufacturing process, 20 colors for the X and the O, which is the name of the computer, and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor, you get 20 times 20: you get 400 different options there. So, the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible. But this is my nephew, Anthony, in Switzerland, and he had the laptop for an afternoon, and I had to take it back. It was hard. (Laughter) And it was a prototype. And a month and a half later, I come back to Switzerland, and there he is playing with his own version. (Laughter) Like paper, paper and cardboard. So, I'm going to finish with one last project, and this is a little bit more of adult play. (Laughter) Some of you might have heard about the New York City condom. It's actually just launched, actually launched on Valentine's Day, February 14, about 10 days ago. So, the Department of Health in New York came to us, and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of New York. So a pretty big endeavor, and we worked on the dispensers. These are the dispensers. There's this friendly shape. It's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant, and it has to be easily serviceable: you have to know where it is and what it does. And we also designed the condoms themselves. And I was just in New York at the launch, and I went to see all these places where they're installed: this is at a Puerto Rican little mom-and-pop store; at a bar in Christopher Street; at a pool hall. I mean, they're being installed in homeless clinics — everywhere. Of course, clubs and discos, too. And here's the public service announcement for this project. (Music) (Laughter) Get some. (Applause) So, this is really where design is able to create a conversation. I was in these venues, and people were, you know, really into getting them. They were excited. It was breaking the ice, it was getting over a stigma, and I think that's also what design can do. So, I was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot, but I'm not sure it's the etiquette here. (Laughter) Yeah? All right, all right. I have only a few. (Laughter) (Applause) So, I have more, you can always ask me for some more later. (Laughter) And if anybody asks why you're carrying a condom, you can just say you like the design. (Laughter) So, I'll finish with just one thought: if we all work together on creating value, but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do, I think we can change the work that we do. We can change these values, can change the companies we work with, and eventually, together, maybe we can change the world. So, thank you. (Applause)

Moving sculpture

Arthur Ganson

{0: 'Arthur Ganson'}

{0: ['sculptor']}

{0: "Arthur Ganson's kinetic metal sculptures mix high art with gearhead humor. He's also the inventor of the kids' construction toy Toobers & Zots."}

2004-03-03

2008-05-27

TED2002

en

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

['art', 'design', 'engineering', 'entertainment', 'humor', 'philosophy']

{162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 32: 'Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string', 144: "The Web's secret stories", 877: 'How to engineer a viral music video', 278: 'The birth of the computer', 2548: "The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't"}

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

Sculptor and engineer Arthur Ganson talks about his work -- kinetic art that explores deep philosophical ideas and is gee-whiz fun to look at.

A few words about how I got started, and it has a lot to do with happiness, actually. When I was a very young child, I was extremely introverted and very much to myself. And, kind of as a way of surviving, I would go into my own very personal space, and I would make things. I would make things for people as a way of, you know, giving, showing them my love. I would go into these private places, and I would put my ideas and my passions into objects — and sort of learning how to speak with my hands. So, the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm, but also with very much the feeling realm. And the ideas are very disparate. I'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces, and there's no real connection between one or the other, except that they sort of come out of my brain, and they're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life, and seeing nature and seeing objects, and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things. When I was a child, I started to explore motion. I fell in love with the way things moved, so I started to explore motion by making little flipbooks. And this is one that I did, probably like when I was around seventh grade, and I remember when I was doing this, I was thinking about that little rock there, and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air, and how the characters — (Laughter) — would come shooting out of the car, so, on my mind, I was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles. And of course, when you're a little kid, there's always destruction. So, it has to end with this — (Laughter) — gratuitous violence. (Laughter) So that was how I first started to explore the way things moved, and expressed it. Now, when I went to college, I found myself making fairly complicated, fragile machines. And this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. When I was in high school, I loved to program computers, so I sort of liked the logical flow of events. I was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon, because it meant working with my hands in a very focused, intense way. So, I started taking art courses, and I found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands, with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system. And also, working with wire — everything that I did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time. So, I was able to sort of exercise all of that. Now, this kind of machine is as close as I can get to painting. And it's full of many little trivial end points, like there's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it doesn't really mean anything. It's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality. The connection I have with engineering is the same as any other engineer, in that I love to solve problems. I love to figure things out, but the end result of what I'm doing is really completely ambiguous. (Laughter) That's pretty ambiguous. (Laughter) The next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex. I gave myself the problem. Since I'm always liking to solve problems, I gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction, and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth. So, when I started this, I didn't have an overall plan for the machine, but I did have a sense of the gesture, and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space. And then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point. That little gear there switches back and forth to change direction. And that's a little found object. So a lot of the pieces that I've made, they involve found objects. And it really — it's almost like doing visual puns all the time. When I see objects, I imagine them in motion. I imagine what can be said with them. This next one here, "Machine with Wishbone," it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner. You know, they say, never play with your food — but I always play with things. So, I had this wishbone, and I thought, it's kind of like a cowboy who's been on his horse for too long. (Laughter) And I started to make him walk across the table, and I thought, "Oh, I can make a little machine that will do that." So, I made this device, linked it up, and the wishbone walks. And because the wishbone is bone — it's animal — it's sort of a point where I think we can enter into it. And that's the whole piece. (Laughter) That's about that big. (Applause) This kind of work is also very much like puppetry, where the found object is, in a sense, the puppet, and I'm the puppeteer at first, because I'm playing with an object. But then I make the machine, which is sort of the stand-in for me, and it is able to achieve the action that I want. The next piece I'll show you is a much more conceptual thought, and it's a little piece called "Cory's Yellow Chair." I had this image in my mind, when I saw my son's little chair, and I saw it explode up and out. And — so the way I saw this in my mind at first, was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed, and the pieces would move far out, and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel, to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center. And they would coalesce for just a moment, so you could perceive that there was a chair there. For me, it's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment, and I wanted to express that. Now, the machine is — in this case, it's a real approximation of that, because obviously you can't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously. This whole thing is about four feet wide, and the chair itself is only about a few inches. (Applause) Now, this is a funny sort of conceptual thing, and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis' "10,000 Year Clock." So, we have a motor here on the left, and it goes through a gear train. There are 12 pairs of 50:1 reductions, so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once. So I've invented it in concrete, because it doesn't really matter. (Laughter) Because it could run all the time. (Laughter) Now, a completely different thought. I'm always imagining myself in different situations. I'm imagining myself as a machine. What would I love? I would love to be bathed in oil. (Laughter) So, this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil. (Laughter) (Applause) And it's really, just sort of — for me, it was just really about the lusciousness of oil. (Laughter) And then, I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art, and I didn't have any pieces. But when she suggested to be in the show, this piece came to mind. So, it's sort of related, but you can see it's much more overtly erotic. And this one I call "Machine with Grease." It's just continually ejaculating, and it's — (Laughter) — this is a happy machine, I'll tell you. (Laughter) It's definitely happy. From an engineering point of view, this is just a little four-bar linkage. And then again, this is a found object, a little fan that I found. And I thought, what about the gesture of opening the fan, and how simply could I state something. And, in a case like this, I'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant. For me, the process is very important, because I'm inventing machines, but I'm also inventing tools to make machines, and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning. So this is a little wire-bending tool. After many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers, I made that tool, and then I made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly — sort of developing my own little world of technology. My life completely changed when I found a spot welder. (Laughter) And that was that tool. It completely changed what I could do. Now here, I'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering. This is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you're in school. I just like, throw it in. I mean, real jewelers put little bits of solder in. So, that's a finished gear. When I moved to Boston, I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society. (Laughter) And the idea, their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street, and there'd be no subjective decision about what was the best. It would be — whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner. (Laughter) So I made — this is my first racing sculpture, and I thought, "Oh, I'm going to make a cart, and I'm going to have it — I'm going to have my hand writing 'faster,' so as I run down the street, the cart's going to talk to me and it's going to go, 'Faster, faster!' " So, that's what it does. (Laughter) But then in the end, what I decided was every time you finish writing the word, I would stop and I would give the card to somebody on the side of the road. So I would never win the race because I'm always stopping. But I had a lot of fun. (Applause) Now, I only have two and a half minutes — I'm going to play this. This is a piece that, for me, is in some ways the most complete kind of piece. Because when I was a kid, I also played a lot of guitar. And when I had this thought, I was imagining that I would make — I would have a whole machine theater evening, where I would — you would have an audience, the curtain would open, and you'd be entertained by machines on stage. So, I imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair, and ... When I'm making these pieces, I'm always trying to find a point where I'm saying something very clearly and it's very simple, but also at the same time it's very ambiguous. And I think there's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it. And that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind, in my heart, and I do my best at finding ways to express them with materials, and it always feels really crude. It's always a struggle, but somehow I manage to sort of get this thought out into an object, and then it's there, OK. It means nothing at all. The object itself just means nothing. Once it's perceived, and someone brings it into their own mind, then there's a cycle that has been completed. And to me, that's the most important thing because, ever since being a kid, I've wanted to communicate my passion and love. And that means the complete cycle of coming from inside, out to the physical, to someone perceiving it. So I'll just let this chair come down. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

A hospital tour in Nigeria

Seyi Oyesola

{0: 'Seyi Oyesola'}

{0: ['doctor']}

{0: 'Physician Seyi Oyesola co-developed the "Hospital in a Box" -- a pop-up, portable, solar-powered OR for off-grid medicine in Africa and elsewhere. But, he says, Africa needs more than new tools to heal itself.'}

2007-06-06

2008-05-27

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['activism', 'design', 'health', 'health care', 'invention', 'public health', 'technology']

{185: 'A commodities exchange for Ethiopia', 156: 'How to educate leaders? Liberal arts', 220: 'A parable for Kenya', 249: 'World-class health care', 1421: 'How do we heal medicine?', 709: 'How low-cost eye care can be world-class'}

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

Dr. Seyi Oyesola takes a searing look at health care in underdeveloped countries. His photo tour of a Nigerian teaching hospital -- all low-tech hacks and donated supplies -- drives home the challenge of doing basic health care there.

Just to put everything in context, and to kind of give you a background to where I'm coming from, so that a lot of the things I'm going to say, and the things I'm going to do — or things I'm going to tell you I've done — you will understand exactly why and how I got motivated to be where I am. I graduated high school in Cleveland, Ohio, 1975. And just like my parents did when they finished studying abroad, we went back home. Finished university education, got a medical degree, 1986. And by the time I was an intern house officer, I could barely afford to maintain my mother's 13-year-old car — and I was a paid doctor. This brings us to why a lot of us, who are professionals, are now, as they say, in diaspora. Now, are we going to make that a permanent thing, where we all get trained, and we leave, and we don't go back? Perhaps not, I should certainly hope not — because that is not my vision. All right, for good measure, that's where Nigeria is on the African map, and just there is the Delta region that I'm sure everybody's heard of. People getting kidnapped, where the oil comes from, the oil that sometimes I think has driven us all crazy in Nigeria. But, critical poverty: this slide is from a presentation I gave not that long ago. Gapminder.org tells the story of the gap between Africa and the rest of the world in terms of health care. Very interesting. How many people do you think are on that taxi? And believe it or not, that is a taxi in Nigeria. And the capital — well, what used to be the capital of Nigeria — Lagos, that's a taxi, and you have police on them. So, tell me, how many policemen do you think are on this taxi? And now? Three. So, when these kind of people — and, believe me, it's not just the police that use these taxis in Lagos. We all do. I've been on one of these, and I didn't have a helmet, either. And it just reminds me of the thought of what happens when one of us on a taxi like this falls off, has an accident and needs a hospital. Believe it or not, some of us do survive. Some of us do survive malaria; we do survive AIDS. And like I tell my family, and my wife reminds me every time, "You're risking your life, you know, every time you go to that country." And she's right. Every time you go there, you know that if you actually need critical care — critical care of any sort — if you have an accident — of which there are many, there are accidents everywhere — where do they go? Where do they go when they need help for this kind of stuff? I'm not saying instead of, I'm saying as well as, AIDS, TB, malaria, typhoid — the list goes on. I'm saying, where do they go when they're like me? When I go back home — and I do all kinds of things, I teach, I train — but I catch one of these things, or I'm chronically ill with one of those, where do they go? What's the economic impact when one of them dies or becomes disabled? I think it's quite significant. This is where they go. These are not old pictures and these are not from some downtrodden — this is a major hospital. In fact, it's from a major teaching hospital in Nigeria. Now that is less than a year old, in an operating room. That's sterilizing equipment in Nigeria. You remember all that oil? Yes, I'm sorry if it upsets some of you, but I think you need to see this. That's the floor, OK? You can say some of this is education. You can say it's hygiene. I'm not pleading poverty. I'm saying we need more than just, you know, vaccination, malaria, AIDS, because I want to be treated in a proper hospital if something happens to me out there. In fact, when I start running around saying, "Hey, boys and girls, you're cardiologists in the U.S., can you come home with me and do a mission?" I want them to think, "Well there's some hope." Now, have a look at that. That's the anesthesiology machine. And that's my specialty, right? Anesthesiology and critical care — look at that bag. It's been taped with tape that we even stopped using in the U.K. And believe me, these are current pictures. Now, if something like this, which has happened in the U.K., that's where they go. This is the intensive care unit in which I work. All right, this is a slide from a talk I gave about intensive care units in Nigeria, and jokingly we refer to it as "Expensive Scare." Because it's scary and it's expensive, but we need to have it, OK? So, these are the problems. There are no prizes for telling us what the problems are, are there? I think we all know. And several speakers before and speakers after me are going to tell us even more problems. These are a few of them. So, what did I do? There we go — we're going on a mission. We're going to do some open-heart surgery. I was the only Brit, on a team of about nine American cardiac surgeons, cardiac nurse, intensive care nurse. We all went out and did a mission and we've done three of them so far. Just so you know, I do believe in missions, I do believe in aid and I do believe in charity. They have their place, but where do they go for those things we talked about earlier? Because it's not everyone that's going to benefit from a mission. Health is wealth, in the words of Hans Rosling. You get wealthier faster if you are healthy first. So, here we are, mission. Big trouble. Open-heart surgery in Nigeria — big trouble. That's Mike, Mike comes out from Mississippi. Does he look like he's happy? It took us two days just to organize the place, but hey, you know, we worked on it. Does he look happy? Yes, that's the medical advice the committee chairman says, "Yes, I told you, you weren't going to be able to, you can't do this, I just know it." Look, that's the technician we had. So yes, you go on, all right? (Laughter) I got him to come with me — anesthesia tech — come with me from the U.K. Yes, let's just go work this thing out. See, that's one of the problems we have in Nigeria and in Africa generally. We get a lot of donated equipment. Equipment that's obsolete, equipment that doesn't quite work, or it works and you can't fix it. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as we use it and we move on. But we had problems with it. We had severe problems there. He had to get on the phone. This guy was always on the phone. So what we going to do now? It looks like all these Americans are here and yes, one Brit, and he's not going to do anything — he thinks he's British actually, and he's actually Nigerian, I just thought about that. We eventually got it working, is the truth, but it was one of these. Even older than the one you saw. The reason I have this picture here, this X-ray, it's just to tell you where and how we were viewing X-rays. Do you figure where that is? It was on a window. I mean, what's an X-ray viewing box? Please. Well, nowadays everything's on PAX anyway. You look at your X-rays on a screen and you do stuff with them, you email them. But we were still using X-rays, but we didn't even have a viewing box! And we were doing open-heart surgery. OK, I know it's not AIDS, I know it's not malaria, but we still need this stuff. Oh yeah, echo — this was just to get the children ready and the adults ready. People still believe in Voodoo. Heart disease, VSD, hole in the heart, tetralogies. You still get people who believe in it and they came. At 67 percent oxygen saturation, the normal is about 97. Her condition, open-heart surgery that as she required, would have been treated when she was a child. We had to do these for adults. So, we did succeed and we still do. We've done three. We're planning another one in July in the north of the country. So, we certainly still do open-heart, but you can see the contrast between everything that was shipped in — we ship everything, instruments. We had explosions because the kit was designed and installed by people who weren't used to it. The oxygen tanks didn't quite work right. But how many did we do the first one? 12. We did 12 open-heart surgical patients successfully. Here is our very first patient, out of intensive care, and just watch that chair, all right? This is what I mean about appropriate technology. That's what he was doing, propping up the bed because the bed simply didn't work. Have you seen one of those before? No? Yes? Doesn't matter, it worked. I'm sure you've all seen or heard this before: "We, the willing, have been doing so much with so little for so long — (Applause) — we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." (Applause) Thank you. Sustainable Solutions — this was my first company. This one's sole aim is to provide the very things that I think are missing. So, we put my hand in my pocket and say, "Guys, let's just buy stuff. Let's go set up a company that teaches people, educates them, gives them the tools they need to keep going." And that's a perfect example of one. Usually when you buy a ventilator in a hospital, you buy a different one for children, you buy a different one for transport. This one will do everything, and it will do it at half the price and doesn't need compressed air. If you're in America and you don't know about this one, we do, because we make it our duty to find out what's appropriate technology for Africa — what's appropriately priced, does the job, and we move on. Anesthesia machine: multi-parameter monitor, operating lights, suction. This little unit here — remember your little 12-volt plug in the car, that charges your, whatever, Game Boy, telephone? That's exactly how the outlets are designed. Yes, it will take a solar panel. Yes a solar panel will charge it. But if you've got mains as well, it will charge the batteries in there. And guess what? We have a little pedal charger too, just in case. And guess what, if it all fails, if you can find a car that's still got a live battery and you stick it in, it will still work. Then you can customize it. Is it dental surgery you want? General surgery you want? Decide which instruments, stock it up with consumables. And currently we're working on oxygen — oxygen delivery on-site. The technology for oxygen delivery is not new. Oxygen concentrators are very old technology. What is new, and what we will have in a few months, I hope, is that ability to use this same renewable energy system to provide and produce oxygen on site. Zeolite — it's not new — zeolite removes nitrogen from air and nitrogen is 78 percent of air. If you take nitrogen out, what's left? Oxygen, pretty much. So that's not new. What we're doing is applying this technology to it. These are the basic features of my device, or our device. This is what makes it so special. Apart from the awards it's won, it's portable and it's certified. It's registered, the MHRA — and the CE mark, for those who don't know, for Europe, is the equivalent of the FDA in the U.S. If you compare it with what's on the market, price-wise, size-wise, ease of use, complexity ... This picture was taken last year. These are members of my graduating class, 1986. It was in this gentleman's house in the Potomac, for those of you who are familiar with Maryland. There are too many of us outside and everybody, just to borrow a bit from Hans — Hans Rosling, he's my guy — if the size of the text represents what gets the most attention, it's the problems. But what we really need are African solutions that are appropriate for Africa — looking at the culture, looking at the people, looking at how much money they've got. African people, because they will do it with a passion, I hope. And lots and lots of that little bit down there, sacrifice. You have to do it. Africans have to do it, in conjunction with everyone else. Thank you. (Applause)

The "bottom billion"

Paul Collier

{0: 'Paul Collier'}

{0: ['economist']}

{0: 'Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion shows what is happening to the poorest people in the world, and offers ideas for opening up opportunities to all.'}

2008-03-03

2008-05-28

TED2008

en

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

['Africa', 'activism', 'business', 'economics', 'global issues', 'politics', 'poverty', 'global development', 'inequality']

{157: 'Patient capitalism', 140: 'New insights on poverty', 127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 3: 'How to rebuild a broken state', 584: 'New rules for rebuilding a broken nation', 1765: 'Imagine a European democracy without borders'}

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

Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.

So, can we dare to be optimistic? Well, the thesis of "The Bottom Billion" is that a billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stagnant for 40 years, and hence diverging from the rest of mankind. And so, the real question to pose is not, "Can we be optimistic?" It's, "How can we give credible hope to that billion people?" That, to my mind, is the fundamental challenge now of development. What I'm going to offer you is a recipe, a combination of the two forces that changed the world for good, which is the alliance of compassion and enlightened self-interest. Compassion, because a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope. That is a human tragedy. Enlightened self-interest, because if that economic divergence continues for another 40 years, combined with social integration globally, it will build a nightmare for our children. We need compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get ourselves serious. That's the alliance that changes the world. So, what does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? What can we actually do? Well, a good guide is to think, "What did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the world?" That gives us, it turns out, quite a good clue, except you have to go back quite a long time. The last time the rich world got serious about developing another region was in the late 1940s. The rich world was you, America, and the region that needed to be developed was my world, Europe. That was post-War Europe. Why did America get serious? It wasn't just compassion for Europe, though there was that. It was that you knew you had to, because, in the late 1940s, country after country in Central Europe was falling into the Soviet bloc, and so you knew you'd no choice. Europe had to be dragged into economic development. So, what did you do, last time you got serious? Well, yes, you had a big aid program. Thank you very much. That was Marshall aid: we need to do it again. Aid is part of the solution. But what else did you do? Well, you tore up your trade policy, and totally reversed it. Before the war, America had been highly protectionist. After the war, you opened your markets to Europe, you dragged Europe into the then-global economy, which was your economy, and you institutionalized that trade liberalization through founding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. So, total reversal of trade policy. Did you do anything else? Yes, you totally reversed your security policy. Before the war, your security policy had been isolationist. After the war, you tear that up, you put 100,000 troops in Europe for over 40 years. So, total reversal of security policy. Anything else? Yes, you tear up the "Eleventh Commandment" — national sovereignty. Before the war, you treated national sovereignty as so sacrosanct that you weren't even willing to join the League of Nations. After the war, you found the United Nations, you found the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, you found the IMF, you encouraged Europe to create the European Community — all systems for mutual government support. That is still the waterfront of effective policies: aid, trade, security, governments. Of course, the details of policy are going to be different, because the challenge is different. It's not rebuilding Europe, it's reversing the divergence for the bottom billion, so that they actually catch up. Is that easier or harder? We need to be at least as serious as we were then. Now, today I'm going to take just one of those four. I'm going to take the one that sounds the weakest, the one that's just motherhood and apple pie — governments, mutual systems of support for governments — and I'm going to show you one idea in how we could do something to strengthen governance, and I'm going to show you that that is enormously important now. The opportunity we're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion, and that is the commodity booms. The commodity booms are pumping unprecedented amounts of money into many, though not all, of the countries of the bottom billion. Partly, they're pumping money in because commodity prices are high, but it's not just that. There's also a range of new discoveries. Uganda has just discovered oil, in about the most disastrous location on Earth; Ghana has discovered oil; Guinea has got a huge new exploitation of iron ore coming out of the ground. So, a mass of new discoveries. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. Just to give you one example: Angola alone is getting 50 billion dollars a year in oil revenue. The entire aid flows to the 60 countries of the bottom billion last year were 34 billion. So, the flow of resources from the commodity booms to the bottom billion are without precedent. So there's the optimism. The question is, how is it going to help their development? It's a huge opportunity for transformational development. Will it be taken? So, here comes a bit of science, and this is a bit of science I've done since "The Bottom Billion," so it's new. I've looked to see what is the relationship between higher commodity prices of exports, and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. And I've looked globally, I've taken all the countries in the world for the last 40 years, and looked to see what the relationship is. And the short run — say, the first five to seven years — is just great. In fact, it's hunky dory: everything goes up. You get more money because your terms of trade have improved, but also that drives up output across the board. So GDP goes up a lot — fantastic! That's the short run. And how about the long run? Come back 15 years later. Well, the short run, it's hunky dory, but the long run, it's humpty dumpty. You go up in the short run, but then most societies historically have ended up worse than if they'd had no booms at all. That is not a forecast about how commodity prices go; it's a forecast of the consequences, the long-term consequences, for growth of an increase in prices. So, what goes wrong? Why is there this "resource curse," as it's called? And again, I've looked at that, and it turns out that the critical issue is the level of governance, the initial level of economic governance, when the resource booms accrue. In fact, if you've got good enough governance, there is no resource boom. You go up in the short term, and then you go up even more in the long term. That's Norway, the richest country in Europe. It's Australia. It's Canada. The resource curse is entirely confined to countries below a threshold of governance. They still go up in the short run. That's what we're seeing across the bottom billion at the moment. The best growth rates they've had — ever. And the question is whether the short run will persist. And with bad governance historically, over the last 40 years, it hasn't. It's countries like Nigeria, which are worse off than if they'd never had oil. So, there's a threshold level above which you go up in the long term, and below which you go down. Just to benchmark that threshold, it's about the governance level of Portugal in the mid 1980s. So, the question is, are the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Now, there's one big change since the commodity booms of the 1970s, and that is the spread of democracy. So I thought, well, maybe that is the thing which has transformed governance in the bottom billion. Maybe we can be more optimistic because of the spread of democracy. So, I looked. Democracy does have significant effects — and unfortunately, they're adverse. Democracies make even more of a mess of these resource booms than autocracies. At that stage I just wanted to abandon the research, but — (Laughter) — it turns out that democracy is a little bit more complicated than that. Because there are two distinct aspects of democracy: there's electoral competition, which determines how you acquire power, and there are checks and balances, which determine how you use power. It turns out that electoral competition is the thing that's doing the damage with democracy, whereas strong checks and balances make resource booms good. And so, what the countries of the bottom billion need is very strong checks and balances. They haven't got them. They got instant democracy in the 1990s: elections without checks and balances. How can we help improve governance and introduce checks and balances? In all the societies of the bottom billion, there are intense struggles to do just that. The simple proposal is that we should have some international standards, which will be voluntary, but which would spell out the key decision points that need to be taken in order to harness these resource revenues. We know these international standards work because we've already got one. It's called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. That is the very simple idea that governments should report to their citizens what revenues they have. No sooner was it proposed than reformers in Nigeria adopted it, pushed it and published the revenues in the paper. Nigerian newspapers circulations spiked. People wanted to know what their government was getting in terms of revenue. So, we know it works. What would the content be of these international standards? I can't go through all of them, but I'll give you an example. The first is how to take the resources out of the ground — the economic processes, taking the resources out of the ground and putting assets on top of the ground. And the first step in that is selling the rights to resource extraction. You know how rights to resource extraction are being sold at the moment, how they've been sold over the last 40 years? A company flies in, does a deal with a minister. And that's great for the company, and it's quite often great for the minister — (Laughter) — and it's not great for their country. There's a very simple institutional technology which can transform that, and it's called verified auctions. The public agency with the greatest expertise on Earth is of course the treasury — that is, the British Treasury. And the British Treasury decided that it would sell the rights to third-generation mobile phones by working out what those rights were worth. They worked out they were worth two billion pounds. Just in time, a set of economists got there and said, "Why not try an auction? It'll reveal the value." It went for 20 billion pounds through auction. If the British Treasury can be out by a factor of 10, think what the ministry of finance in Sierra Leone is going to be like. (Laughter) When I put that to the President of Sierra Leone, the next day he asked the World Bank to send him a team to give expertise on how to conduct auctions. There are five such decision points; each one needs an international standard. If we could do it, we would change the world. We would be helping the reformers in these societies, who are struggling for change. That's our modest role. We cannot change these societies, but we can help the people in these societies who are struggling and usually failing, because the odds are so stacked against them. And yet, we've not got these rules. If you think about it, the cost of promulgating international rules is zilch — nothing. Why on Earth are they not there? I realized that the reason they're not there is that until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures. That unless we have an informed society, what politicians do, especially in relation to Africa, is gestures: things that look good, but don't work. And so I realized we had to go through the business of building an informed citizenry. That's why I broke all the professional rules of conduct for an economist, and I wrote an economics book that you could read on a beach. (Laughter). However, I have to say, the process of communication does not come naturally to me. This is why I'm on this stage, but it's alarming. I grew up in a culture of self-effacement. My wife showed me a blog comment on one of my last talks, and the blog comment said, "Collier is not charismatic — (Laughter) — but his arguments are compelling." (Laughter) (Applause) If you agree with that sentiment, and if you agree that we need a critical mass of informed citizenry, you will realize that I need you. Please, become ambassadors. Thank you. (Applause)

Memes and "temes"

Susan Blackmore

{0: 'Susan Blackmore'}

{0: ['memeticist']}

{0: 'Susan Blackmore studies memes -- those self-replicating "life forms" that spread themselves via human consciousness. We\'re now headed, she believes, toward a new form of meme, spread by the technology we\'ve created.'}

2008-02-29

2008-06-03

TED2008

en

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

['brain', 'culture', 'design', 'evolution', 'meme', 'technology']

{19: 'How technology evolves', 102: 'The illusion of consciousness', 214: "A plant's-eye view", 116: 'Dangerous memes', 351: 'Health and the human mind', 1346: 'Back to the future (of 1994)'}

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

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for any species to let loose on its planet. By the time you realize what's happening, the child is a toddler, up and causing havoc, and it's too late to put it back. We humans are Earth's Pandoran species. We're the ones who let the second replicator out of its box, and we can't push it back in. We're seeing the consequences all around us. Now that, I suggest, is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously. And it gives us a new way of thinking about not only what's going on on our planet, but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos. So first of all, I'd like to say something about memetics and the theory of memes, and secondly, how this might answer questions about who's out there, if indeed anyone is. So, memetics: memetics is founded on the principle of Universal Darwinism. Darwin had this amazing idea. Indeed, some people say it's the best idea anybody ever had. Isn't that a wonderful thought, that there could be such a thing as a best idea anybody ever had? Do you think there could? Audience: No. (Laughter) Susan Blackmore: Someone says no, very loudly, from over there. Well, I say yes, and if there is, I give the prize to Darwin. Why? Because the idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. I would say not just biological design, but all of the design that we think of as human design. It's all just the same thing happening. What did Darwin say? I know you know the idea, natural selection, but let me just paraphrase "The Origin of Species," 1859, in a few sentences. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and that can't be doubted — I've been to the Galapagos, and I've measured the size of the beaks and the size of the turtle shells and so on, and so on. And 100 pages later. (Laughter) And if there is a struggle for life, such that nearly all of these creatures die — and this can't be doubted, I've read Malthus and I've calculated how long it would take for elephants to cover the whole world if they bred unrestricted, and so on and so on. And another 100 pages later. And if the very few that survive pass onto their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents were. You see the idea? If, if, if, then. He had no concept of the idea of an algorithm, but that's what he described in that book, and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm. The principle is you just need those three things — variation, selection and heredity. And as Dan Dennett puts it, if you have those, then you must get evolution. Or design out of chaos, without the aid of mind. There's one word I love on that slide. What do you think my favorite word is? Audience: Chaos. SB: Chaos? No. What? Mind? No. Audience: Without. SB: No, not without. (Laughter) You try them all in order: Mmm...? Audience: Must. SB: Must, at must. Must, must. This is what makes it so amazing. You don't need a designer, or a plan, or foresight, or anything else. If there's something that is copied with variation and it's selected, then you must get design appearing out of nowhere. You can't stop it. Must is my favorite word there. Now, what's this to do with memes? Well, the principle here applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection. We're so used to thinking in terms of biology, we think about genes this way. Darwin didn't, of course; he didn't know about genes. He talked mostly about animals and plants, but also about languages evolving and becoming extinct. But the principle of Universal Darwinism is that any information that is varied and selected will produce design. And this is what Richard Dawkins was on about in his 1976 bestseller, "The Selfish Gene." The information that is copied, he called the replicator. It selfishly copies. Not meaning it kind of sits around inside cells going, "I want to get copied." But that it will get copied if it can, regardless of the consequences. It doesn't care about the consequences because it can't, because it's just information being copied. And he wanted to get away from everybody thinking all the time about genes, and so he said, "Is there another replicator out there on the planet?" Ah, yes, there is. Look around you — here will do, in this room. All around us, still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator. Information that we copy from person to person, by imitation, by language, by talking, by telling stories, by wearing clothes, by doing things. This is information copied with variation and selection. This is design process going on. He wanted a name for the new replicator. So, he took the Greek word "mimeme," which means that which is imitated. Remember that, that's the core definition: that which is imitated. And abbreviated it to meme, just because it sounds good and made a good meme, an effective spreading meme. So that's how the idea came about. It's important to stick with that definition. The whole science of memetics is much maligned, much misunderstood, much feared. But a lot of these problems can be avoided by remembering the definition. A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It's not an idea. It's not equivalent to anything else, really. Stick with the definition. It's that which is imitated, or information which is copied from person to person. So, let's see some memes. Well, you sir, you've got those glasses hung around your neck in that particularly fetching way. I wonder whether you invented that idea for yourself, or copied it from someone else? If you copied it from someone else, it's a meme. And what about, oh, I can't see any interesting memes here. All right everyone, who's got some interesting memes for me? Oh, well, your earrings, I don't suppose you invented the idea of earrings. You probably went out and bought them. There are plenty more in the shops. That's something that's passed on from person to person. All the stories that we're telling — well, of course, TED is a great meme-fest, masses of memes. The way to think about memes, though, is to think, why do they spread? They're selfish information, they will get copied, if they can. But some of them will be copied because they're good, or true, or useful, or beautiful. Some of them will be copied even though they're not. Some, it's quite hard to tell why. There's one particular curious meme which I rather enjoy. And I'm glad to say, as I expected, I found it when I came here, and I'm sure all of you found it, too. You go to your nice, posh, international hotel somewhere, and you come in and you put down your clothes and you go to the bathroom, and what do you see? Audience: Bathroom soap. SB: Pardon? Audience: Soap. SB: Soap, yeah. What else do you see? Audience: (Inaudible) SB: Mmm mmm. Audience: Sink, toilet! SB: Sink, toilet, yes, these are all memes, they're all memes, but they're sort of useful ones, and then there's this one. (Laughter) What is this one doing? (Laughter) This has spread all over the world. It's not surprising that you all found it when you arrived in your bathrooms here. But I took this photograph in a toilet at the back of a tent in the eco-camp in the jungle in Assam. (Laughter) Who folded that thing up there, and why? (Laughter) Some people get carried away. (Laughter) Other people are just lazy and make mistakes. Some hotels exploit the opportunity to put even more memes with a little sticker. (Laughter) What is this all about? I suppose it's there to tell you that somebody's cleaned the place, and it's all lovely. And you know, actually, all it tells you is that another person has potentially spread germs from place to place. (Laughter) So, think of it this way. Imagine a world full of brains and far more memes than can possibly find homes. The memes are all trying to get copied — trying, in inverted commas — i.e., that's the shorthand for, if they can get copied, they will. They're using you and me as their propagating, copying machinery, and we are the meme machines. Now, why is this important? Why is this useful, or what does it tell us? It gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human, all conventional theories of cultural evolution, of the origin of humans, and what makes us so different from other species. All other theories explaining the big brain, and language, and tool use and all these things that make us unique, are based upon genes. Language must have been useful for the genes. Tool use must have enhanced our survival, mating and so on. It always comes back, as Richard Dawkins complained all that long time ago, it always comes back to genes. The point of memetics is to say, "Oh no, it doesn't." There are two replicators now on this planet. From the moment that our ancestors, perhaps two and a half million years ago or so, began imitating, there was a new copying process. Copying with variation and selection. A new replicator was let loose, and it could never be — right from the start — it could never be that human beings who let loose this new creature, could just copy the useful, beautiful, true things, and not copy the other things. While their brains were having an advantage from being able to copy — lighting fires, keeping fires going, new techniques of hunting, these kinds of things — inevitably they were also copying putting feathers in their hair, or wearing strange clothes, or painting their faces, or whatever. So, you get an arms race between the genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff, and the memes themselves, like the sounds that people made and copied — in other words, what turned out to be language — competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger. So, the big brain, on this theory, is driven by the memes. This is why, in "The Meme Machine," I called it memetic drive. As the memes evolve, as they inevitably must, they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that are doing the driving. This is why we've ended up with such peculiar brains, that we like religion, and music, and art. Language is a parasite that we've adapted to, not something that was there originally for our genes, on this view. And like most parasites, it can begin dangerous, but then it coevolves and adapts, and we end up with a symbiotic relationship with this new parasite. And so, from our perspective, we don't realize that that's how it began. So, this is a view of what humans are. All other species on this planet are gene machines only, they don't imitate at all well, hardly at all. We alone are gene machines and meme machines as well. The memes took a gene machine and turned it into a meme machine. But that's not all. We have a new kind of memes now. I've been wondering for a long time, since I've been thinking about memes a lot, is there a difference between the memes that we copy — the words we speak to each other, the gestures we copy, the human things — and all these technological things around us? I have always, until now, called them all memes, but I do honestly think now we need a new word for technological memes. Let's call them techno-memes or temes. Because the processes are getting different. We began, perhaps 5,000 years ago, with writing. We put the storage of memes out there on a clay tablet, but in order to get true temes and true teme machines, you need to get the variation, the selection and the copying, all done outside of humans. And we're getting there. We're at this extraordinary point where we're nearly there, that there are machines like that. And indeed, in the short time I've already been at TED, I see we're even closer than I thought we were before. So actually, now the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines. Our children are growing up very quickly learning to read, learning to use machinery. We're going to have all kinds of implants, drugs that force us to stay awake all the time. We'll think we're choosing these things, but the temes are making us do it. So, we're at this cusp now of having a third replicator on our planet. Now, what about what else is going on out there in the universe? Is there anyone else out there? People have been asking this question for a long time. We've been asking it here at TED already. In 1961, Frank Drake made his famous equation, but I think he concentrated on the wrong things. It's been very productive, that equation. He wanted to estimate N, the number of communicative civilizations out there in our galaxy, and he included in there the rate of star formation, the rate of planets, but crucially, intelligence. I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Intelligence appears all over the place, in all kinds of guises. Human intelligence is only one kind of a thing. But what's really important is the replicators you have and the levels of replicators, one feeding on the one before. So, I would suggest that we don't think intelligence, we think replicators. And on that basis, I've suggested a different kind of equation. A very simple equation. N, the same thing, the number of communicative civilizations out there [that] we might expect in our galaxy. Just start with the number of planets there are in our galaxy. The fraction of those which get a first replicator. The fraction of those that get the second replicator. The fraction of those that get the third replicator. Because it's only the third replicator that's going to reach out — sending information, sending probes, getting out there, and communicating with anywhere else. OK, so if we take that equation, why haven't we heard from anybody out there? Because every step is dangerous. Getting a new replicator is dangerous. You can pull through, we have pulled through, but it's dangerous. Take the first step, as soon as life appeared on this earth. We may take the Gaian view. I loved Peter Ward's talk yesterday — it's not Gaian all the time. Actually, life forms produce things that kill themselves. Well, we did pull through on this planet. But then, a long time later, billions of years later, we got the second replicator, the memes. That was dangerous, all right. Think of the big brain. How many mothers do we have here? You know all about big brains. They are dangerous to give birth to, are agonizing to give birth to. (Laughter) My cat gave birth to four kittens, purring all the time. Ah, mm — slightly different. (Laughter) But not only is it painful, it kills lots of babies, it kills lots of mothers, and it's very expensive to produce. The genes are forced into producing all this myelin, all the fat to myelinate the brain. Do you know, sitting here, your brain is using about 20 percent of your body's energy output for two percent of your body weight? It's a really expensive organ to run. Why? Because it's producing the memes. Now, it could have killed us off. It could have killed us off, and maybe it nearly did, but you see, we don't know. But maybe it nearly did. Has it been tried before? What about all those other species? Louise Leakey talked yesterday about how we're the only one in this branch left. What happened to the others? Could it be that this experiment in imitation, this experiment in a second replicator, is dangerous enough to kill people off? Well, we did pull through, and we adapted. But now, we're hitting, as I've just described, we're hitting the third replicator point. And this is even more dangerous — well, it's dangerous again. Why? Because the temes are selfish replicators and they don't care about us, or our planet, or anything else. They're just information, why would they? They are using us to suck up the planet's resources to produce more computers, and more of all these amazing things we're hearing about here at TED. Don't think, "Oh, we created the Internet for our own benefit." That's how it seems to us. Think, temes spreading because they must. We are the old machines. Now, are we going to pull through? What's going to happen? What does it mean to pull through? Well, there are kind of two ways of pulling through. One that is obviously happening all around us now, is that the temes turn us into teme machines, with these implants, with the drugs, with us merging with the technology. And why would they do that? Because we are self-replicating. We have babies. We make new ones, and so it's convenient to piggyback on us, because we're not yet at the stage on this planet where the other option is viable. Although it's closer, I heard this morning, it's closer than I thought it was. Where the teme machines themselves will replicate themselves. That way, it wouldn't matter if the planet's climate was utterly destabilized, and it was no longer possible for humans to live here. Because those teme machines, they wouldn't need — they're not squishy, wet, oxygen-breathing, warmth-requiring creatures. They could carry on without us. So, those are the two possibilities. The second, I don't think we're that close. It's coming, but we're not there yet. The first, it's coming too. But the damage that is already being done to the planet is showing us how dangerous the third point is, that third danger point, getting a third replicator. And will we get through this third danger point, like we got through the second and like we got through the first? Maybe we will, maybe we won't. I have no idea. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was an incredible talk. SB: Thank you. I scared myself. CA: (Laughter)

Archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...

Nathan Myhrvold

{0: 'Nathan Myhrvold'}

{0: ['polymath']}

{0: "Nathan Myhrvold is a professional jack-of-all-trades. After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he's been a world barbecue champion, a wildlife photographer, a chef, a contributor to SETI, and a volcano explorer."}

2007-03-03

2008-06-04

TED2007

en

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

['animals', 'dinosaurs', 'entertainment', 'exploration', 'fish', 'humor', 'photography', 'archaeology']

{237: 'The call to learn', 203: "We're worried about local warming ... in your lap", 181: 'Life at 30,000 feet', 428: 'Digging up dinosaurs', 1352: 'Where are the baby dinosaurs?', 1163: 'Building a dinosaur from a chicken'}

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

Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire. Listen for wild stories from the (somewhat raunchy) edge of the animal world.

So, I'm in Chile, in the Atacama desert, sitting in a hotel lobby, because that's the only place that I can get a Wi-Fi connection, and I have this picture up on my screen, and a woman comes up behind me. She says, "Oh, that's beautiful. What is it? Is that Jackson Pollock?" And unfortunately, I can be a little too honest. I said, "No, it's — it's penguin shit." (Laughter) And, you know, "Excuse me!" And I could sense that she thought I was speaking synecdochically. (Laughter) So, I said, "No, no, really — it's penguin shit." (Laughter) Because I had just been in the Falkland Islands taking pictures of penguins. This is a Gentoo penguin. And she was still skeptical. So, literally, a few minutes before that, I downloaded this scientific paper about calculations on avian defecation, which is really quite interesting, because it turns out you can model this as something called "Poiseuille flow," and you can learn an awful lot about the physics of the avian rectum. Actually, technically, it's not a rectum. It's called a cloaca. At this point, she stops me, and she says, "Who are you? Wha — what do you do?" And I was stuck, because I didn't have any way to describe what I do. And so, in some sense, this talk today is my answer to that. It's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that I do. And it's very hard for me to make sense of it, so I'm not sure that you can. It's the kind of thing that I sit up late at night thinking about sometimes — often at four in the morning. So, some people are afraid of what I do. Some people think I am the nerd Tony Soprano, and in response, I have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector. I'm not sure what these people think, because I don't speak Norsk. (Laughter) But I'm not thinking "monsteret" is a good thing. I don't know, you know? So, one of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, "Well, really, what were they thinking?" And recently, I was in Easter Island, which is an incredibly beautiful place, and an incredibly mysterious place, because no matter where you go in Easter Island, you're struck by these statues, called the moai. The place is 64 square miles. They made, so far as we can tell, 900 of them. Why on Earth? And if you haven't read Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," I totally recommend that you do. He's got a great chapter about it. Basically, these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these. And somewhere along the line, somebody said, "I know! Let's cut down the last tree and commit suicide, because we need more identical statues." (Laughter) And, one thing that isn't a mystery, actually, was when I grew up — because when I was a little kid, I'd seen these pictures — and I thought, "Well, why that look on the face? Why that brow?" I mean, it's such a powerful thing. Where did they get that inspiration? And then I met Yoyo, who is the native Rapa Nui-an guide, and if you look at Yoyo's face, you kind of figure out where they got it. There's many mysteries, these statues. Everyone wants to know, how did they make them, how did they transport them? This woman in the foreground is Jo Anne Van Tilberg. She's the leading archaeologist working Easter Island today. And she has studied the statues for 20-some years, and she has detailed records of every single statue. The one on the page here is the same that's up there. One interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard. So, this used to be completely smooth. In fact, in many of the statues, when you excavate them, the backs are totally smooth — almost glass smooth. But after 1,000 years out in the weather, they look like this. Jo Anne and I have just embarked on a project to digitize them all, and we're going to do a very high-res digitization, first because it's a way of preserving them. Second, we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically, then, learn a few of the mysteries about them. How long have they been standing in what positions? And maybe, indirectly, get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are. While I was in Easter Island, comet McNaught was there also, so you get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet. I also have an archaeological project going on in Egypt. "Going on" is perhaps a little bit strong. We're trying to get all of the permissions to get everything all set, to get it going. So, I'll talk about it at a future TED. But there's some amazing opportunities in Egypt as well. Another thing I do is I invent stuff. In fact, I design nuclear reactors. Not a joke. This is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle. The red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors. It's called the open fuel cycle. The white lines are what's called an advance fuel cycle, where you reprocess. Now, this is the normal way it's done. It's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution. It has a lot of disadvantages: each one of these steps is extremely expensive, it's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step cannot be performed in anyone's backyard, which is a problem. So, our reactor eliminates these steps, which, if we can actually make it work, is a really cool thing. Now, it's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor. There's — no reactor's been even built to an old design, much less a new one, in the United States for 25 years. It's the kind of very high-risk, but potentially very high-return thing that we do. Changing into a totally different field, we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics, particularly in an area called metamaterials. A metamaterial is an artificial material, which manipulates, in this case, electromagnetic radiation, in a way that you couldn't otherwise. So, this device here is an invisibility cloak. It may not seem that, but if you were a microwave, this is how you would view it. Rays of light — in this case, microwave light — come in, and they just squish around the cell, and they come back the other side. Now, you could do that with mirrors from one angle. The cool thing is, this does it from all angles. Metamaterials, unfortunately — A, it only works on microwave, and B, it doesn't work all that well yet. But metamaterials are an incredibly exciting field. It's — you know, today I'd like to say it's a zero billion dollar business, but, in fact, it's negative. But some day, some day, maybe it's going to work. We do a lot of work in biomedical fields. In this case, we're working with a major medical foundation to develop inexpensive ways of diagnosing diseases in developing countries. So, they say the eyes are the windows of the soul — turns out they're a window to a whole lot more stuff. And these happen to be my eyes, by the way. Now, I'm also very interested in cooking. While I was at Microsoft, I took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in France. I used to work, also while at Microsoft, at a leading restaurant in Seattle, so I do a lot of cooking. I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to — there's tremendous traditions, there's secrecy. And I'm trying to use a very scientific approach. So, this is my latest cooker, and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor, that's because it is. But if you get to play with all those knobs and dials — and of course, really the controller over there does it all on software — you can make some terrific ribs. (Laughter) This is a high-speed centrifuge. You should all have one in your kitchen, beside your Turbochef. This subjects food to a force about 50,000 times that of normal gravity, and oh boy, does it clarify chicken stock. You would not believe it! I perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food — in this case, trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are. It turns out, A, it's useful, and for a geek like me, it's fun. Theory is red, black is experiment. So, I'm either really good at faking it, or this particular model seems to work. So, another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie "Contact," which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way. In fact, almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character, a real person. So, the Jodie Foster character here is actually this woman, Jill Tarter, and Jill has dedicated her life to this. You know, a lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years — may not ever. So, I like to support people that are risking their lives. After the movie came out, of course, there was a lot of interest in SETI. My kids saw the movie, and afterwards they came to me and they said, "So, Dad, so — so — that character — that's Jill, right?" I said, "Oh, yeah, yeah — absolutely." "And that other person, that's someone — " I said, "Yes." They said, "Well, you know that creepy rich guy in the movie? Is that you?" I said, "Well, you know, it's just a movie! Come on." (Laughter) So, the SETI Institute, with a little bit of help from me, and a lot of help from Paul Allen and a variety of other people, is building a dedicated radio telescope in Hat Creek, California, so they can do this SETI work. Now, I travel a lot, and I change cell phones a lot, and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is Jill, because I really don't want to miss "the call." (Laughter) I mean, can you imagine? E.T.'s phoning home, and I'm not, like, there? You know, horrible! So, I do a lot of work on dinosaurs. I'm known to TEDsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs. And I resemble that remark. I'm going to talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs, which is the finding of them. Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs. So, you always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands, areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring. You know, skiers pray for snow? Paleontologists pray for erosion. So, you hike around and — this is after you dig them up, they look like this. You hike around, you see something like this. Now, this is something I found, so look at it very closely here. You've got this bentonite clay, which is — sort of swells up and expands. And there's some stuff poking out. So, you look at that, and you look up close, and you say, "Well, gee, that's kind of interesting. What are all of these pieces?" Well, if you look closely, you can recognize, actually, from the shape, that these are skull fragments. And then when you look at this, you say, "That's a tooth. It's a big tooth." It's about the size of a banana. It has a big serration on the edge. This is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground. And this is what it's like to find a Tyrannosaurus rex, which I was lucky enough to do a few years ago. Now, this is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room. Not the same one, actually. This is a cast, which I had bought, and then, after buying the cast, I found my own, and I don't have room for two. You know. So, the thing that's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing, because you're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago. It's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways. The study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there's a problem with asteroid impact, for example. The study of dinosaurs may, literally, one day save the planet. Study of the ancient climate is very important. In fact, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, had much higher CO2 than today, was much warmer than today, and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of CO2 on climate. But, besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting, it's also very different than the other things I do, because you get to hike around in the badlands. This is actually what most dinosaur research looks like. This is one of my papers: "A pygostyle from a non-avian theropod." It's not as gripping as dinosaur sex, so we're not going to go into it further. Now, I'm also really big on photography. I travel all over the world taking pictures — some of them good, most of them not. These days, bits are cheap. Unfortunately, that means you've got to spend more time sorting through them. Here's a picture I took in the Falkland Islands of king penguins on a beach. Here's a picture I took in Alaska, a few years ago, of Orcas. I'd gone up to photograph Orcas, and we had looked for a week, and we hadn't seen a damn Orca. And the last day, the sun comes out, the Orcas come, they're right by the boat. It's fantastic. And I get lots of pictures like this. Then, a little bit later, I start getting some pictures like this. Now, to a human audience, I need to explain that if Penthouse magazine had a marine mammal edition, this would be the centerfold. It's true. So, there's more and more activity near the boat, and all of a sudden somebody shouts, "What's that in the water?" I said, "Well, I think that's what you call a free willy." (Laughter) There's a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex. (Laughter) The first thing you learn is the overwhelming importance of hands. They don't have them. (Laughter) I think Paul Simon is in the audience, and he has — he may not realize it, but he wrote a song all about whale sex, "Slip-Slidin' Away." That's kind of what it's like. The other interesting thing that I learned about whale sex: they curl their toes too. (Laughter) So — where do you go putting all of these disparate pieces together? You know, there's a tremendous amount of wisdom in finding a great thing, passion in life, and focusing all your energy on it, and I've never been able to do that. I just — you know, because, yes, I'll focus passion on something, but then there will be something else, and then there's something else again. And for a long time I fought this, and I thought, "Well, gee, I really ought to buckle down." And you know, when I was at Microsoft, that was so engrossing, and the whole industry was expanding so much, that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my life. But ultimately, I decided that what I really ought to do is not fight being who I am, but embrace it. And say, "Yeah, you know, I — this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep, but that's really what works for me." And regardless of whether it's nuclear reactors or metamaterials or whale sex, the common — or lowest common denominator — is me. That's it, thank you. (Applause)

The worldwide web of belief and ritual

Wade Davis

{0: 'Wade Davis'}

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

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

2008-02-02

2008-06-10

TED2008

en

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

['anthropology', 'beauty', 'culture', 'faith', 'global issues', 'photography', 'religion', 'indigenous peoples']

{69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 40: 'The story of life in photographs', 34: 'Photos of endangered cultures', 1081: "Curating humanity's heritage", 363: 'Lessons from past presidents', 1076: 'Inspiring a life of immersion'}

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

Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance.

You know, culture was born of the imagination, and the imagination — the imagination as we know it — came into being when our species descended from our progenitor, Homo erectus, and, infused with consciousness, began a journey that would carry it to every corner of the habitable world. For a time, we shared the stage with our distant cousins, Neanderthal, who clearly had some spark of awareness, but — whether it was the increase in the size of the brain, or the development of language, or some other evolutionary catalyst — we quickly left Neanderthal gasping for survival. By the time the last Neanderthal disappeared in Europe, 27,000 years ago, our direct ancestors had already, and for 5,000 years, been crawling into the belly of the earth, where in the light of the flickers of tallow candles, they had brought into being the great art of the Upper Paleolithic. And I spent two months in the caves of southwest France with the poet Clayton Eshleman, who wrote a beautiful book called "Juniper Fuse." And you could look at this art and you could, of course, see the complex social organization of the people who brought it into being. But more importantly, it spoke of a deeper yearning, something far more sophisticated than hunting magic. And the way Clayton put it was this way. He said, "You know, clearly at some point, we were all of an animal nature, and at some point, we weren't." And he viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt, through ritual, to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So, he saw this art not as hunting magic, but as postcards of nostalgia. And viewed in that light, it takes on a whole other resonance. And the most amazing thing about the Upper Paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic expression, it lasted for almost 20,000 years. If these were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell indeed. And it was also the beginning of our discontent, because if you wanted to distill all of our experience since the Paleolithic, it would come down to two words: how and why. And these are the slivers of insight upon which cultures have been forged. Now, all people share the same raw, adaptive imperatives. We all have children. We all have to deal with the mystery of death, the world that waits beyond death, the elders who fall away into their elderly years. All of this is part of our common experience, and this shouldn't surprise us, because, after all, biologists have finally proven it to be true, something that philosophers have always dreamt to be true. And that is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth. All of humanity, probably, is descended from a thousand people who left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago. But the corollary of that is that, if we all are brothers and sisters and share the same genetic material, all human populations share the same raw human genius, the same intellectual acuity. And so whether that genius is placed into — technological wizardry has been the great achievement of the West — or by contrast, into unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no progression of affairs in human experience. There is no trajectory of progress. There's no pyramid that conveniently places Victorian England at the apex and descends down the flanks to the so-called primitives of the world. All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life itself. But what do I mean by different visions of life making for completely different possibilities for existence? Well, let's slip for a moment into the greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the imagination, that of Polynesia. 10,000 square kilometers, tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea. I recently sailed on the Hokulea, named after the sacred star of Hawaii, throughout the South Pacific to make a film about the navigators. These are men and women who, even today, can name 250 stars in the night sky. These are men and women who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon, simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their vessel, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint. These are sailors who in the darkness, in the hull of the vessel, can distinguish as many as 32 different sea swells moving through the canoe at any one point in time, distinguishing local wave disturbances from the great currents that pulsate across the ocean, that can be followed with the same ease that a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. Indeed, if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia. And if we slip from the realm of the sea into the realm of the spirit of the imagination, you enter the realm of Tibetan Buddhism. And I recently made a film called "The Buddhist Science of the Mind." Why did we use that word, science? What is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2,500 years of empirical observation as to the nature of mind? I travelled for a month in Nepal with our good friend, Matthieu Ricard, and you'll remember Matthieu famously said to all of us here once at TED, "Western science is a major response to minor needs." We spend all of our lifetime trying to live to be 100 without losing our teeth. The Buddhist spends all their lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence. Our billboards celebrate naked children in underwear. Their billboards are manuals, prayers to the well-being of all sentient creatures. And with the blessing of Trulshik Rinpoche, we began a pilgrimage to a curious destination, accompanied by a great doctor. And the destination was a single room in a nunnery, where a woman had gone into lifelong retreat 55 years before. And en route, we took darshan from Rinpoche, and he sat with us and told us about the Four Noble Truths, the essence of the Buddhist path. All life is suffering. That doesn't mean all life is negative. It means things happen. The cause of suffering is ignorance. By that, the Buddha did not mean stupidity; he meant clinging to the illusion that life is static and predictable. The third noble truth said that ignorance can be overcome. And the fourth and most important, of course, was the delineation of a contemplative practice that not only had the possibility of a transformation of the human heart, but had 2,500 years of empirical evidence that such a transformation was a certainty. And so, when this door opened onto the face of a woman who had not been out of that room in 55 years, you did not see a mad woman. You saw a woman who was more clear than a pool of water in a mountain stream. And of course, this is what the Tibetan monks told us. They said, at one point, you know, we don't really believe you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do. And if we move from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the physical, to the sacred geography of Peru — I've always been interested in the relationships of indigenous people that literally believe that the Earth is alive, responsive to all of their aspirations, all of their needs. And, of course, the human population has its own reciprocal obligations. I spent 30 years living amongst the people of Chinchero and I always heard about an event that I always wanted to participate in. Once each year, the fastest young boy in each hamlet is given the honor of becoming a woman. And for one day, he wears the clothing of his sister and he becomes a transvestite, a waylaka. And for that day, he leads all able-bodied men on a run, but it's not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet. You run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa. You run up to 15,000 feet, descend 3,000 feet. Climb again over the course of 24 hours. And of course, the waylakama spin, the trajectory of the route, is marked by holy mounds of Earth, where coke is given to the Earth, libations of alcohol to the wind, the vortex of the feminine is brought to the mountaintop. And the metaphor is clear: you go into the mountain as an individual, but through exhaustion, through sacrifice, you emerge as a community that has once again reaffirmed its sense of place in the planet. And at 48, I was the only outsider ever to go through this, only one to finish it. I only managed to do it by chewing more coca leaves in one day than anyone in the 4,000-year history of the plant. But these localized rituals become pan-Andean, and these fantastic festivals, like that of the Qoyllur Rit'i, which occurs when the Pleiades reappear in the winter sky. It's kind of like an Andean Woodstock: 60,000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley, called the Sinakara, which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier. The metaphor is so clear. You bring the crosses from your community, in this wonderful fusion of Christian and pre-Columbian ideas. You place the cross into the ice, in the shadow of Ausangate, the most sacred of all Apus, or sacred mountains of the Inca. And then you do the ritual dances that empower the crosses. Now, these ideas and these events allow us even to deconstruct iconic places that many of you have been to, like Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never a lost city. On the contrary, it was completely linked in to the 14,000 kilometers of royal roads the Inca made in less than a century. But more importantly, it was linked in to the Andean notions of sacred geography. The intiwatana, the hitching post to the sun, is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that falls on the sacred Apu of Machu Picchu, which is Sugarloaf Mountain, called Huayna Picchu. If you come to the south of the intiwatana, you find an altar. Climb Huayna Picchu, find another altar. Take a direct north-south bearing, you find to your astonishment that it bisects the intiwatana stone, goes to the skyline, hits the heart of Salcantay, the second of the most important mountains of the Incan empire. And then beyond Salcantay, of course, when the southern cross reaches the southernmost point in the sky, directly in that same alignment, the Milky Way overhead. But what is enveloping Machu Picchu from below? The sacred river, the Urubamba, or the Vilcanota, which is itself the Earthly equivalent of the Milky Way, but it's also the trajectory that Viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the universe into being. And where does the river rise? Right on the slopes of the Koariti. So, 500 years after Columbus, these ancient rhythms of landscape are played out in ritual. Now, when I was here at the first TED, I showed this photograph: two men of the Elder Brothers, the descendants, survivors of El Dorado. These, of course, are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization. If those of you who are here remember that I mentioned that they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood, but the training for the priesthood is extraordinary. Taken from their families, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness for 18 years — two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to evoke the nine months they spend in the natural mother's womb. All that time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as they are taught the values of their society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone, maintain the cosmic balance. Now, the measure of a society is not only what it does, but the quality of its aspirations. And I always wanted to go back into these mountains, to see if this could possibly be true, as indeed had been reported by the great anthropologist, Reichel-Dolmatoff. So, literally two weeks ago, I returned from having spent six weeks with the Elder Brothers on what was clearly the most extraordinary trip of my life. These really are a people who live and breathe the realm of the sacred, a baroque religiosity that is simply awesome. They consume more coca leaves than any human population, half a pound per man, per day. The gourd you see here is — everything in their lives is symbolic. Their central metaphor is a loom. They say, "Upon this loom, I weave my life." They refer to the movements as they exploit the ecological niches of the gradient as "threads." When they pray for the dead, they make these gestures with their hands, spinning their thoughts into the heavens. You can see the calcium buildup on the head of the poporo gourd. The gourd is a feminine aspect; the stick is a male. You put the stick in the powder to take the sacred ashes — well, they're not ashes, they're burnt limestone — to empower the coca leaf, to change the pH of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride. But if you break a gourd, you cannot simply throw it away, because every stroke of that stick that has built up that calcium, the measure of a man's life, has a thought behind it. Fields are planted in such an extraordinary way, that the one side of the field is planted like that by the women. The other side is planted like that by the men. Metaphorically, you turn it on the side, and you have a piece of cloth. And they are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization, the greatest goldsmiths of South America, who in the wake of the conquest, retreated into this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet above the Caribbean coastal plain. There are four societies: the Kogi, the Wiwa, the Kankwano and the Arhuacos. I traveled with the Arhuacos, and the wonderful thing about this story was that this man, Danilo Villafane — if we just jump back here for a second. When I first met Danilo, in the Colombian embassy in Washington, I couldn't help but say, "You know, you look a lot like an old friend of mine." Well, it turns out he was the son of my friend, Adalberto, from 1974, who had been killed by the FARC. And I said, "Danilo, you won't remember this, but when you were an infant, I carried you on my back, up and down the mountains." And because of that, Danilo invited us to go to the very heart of the world, a place where no journalist had ever been permitted. Not simply to the flanks of the mountains, but to the very iced peaks which are the destiny of the pilgrims. And this man sitting cross-legged is now a grown-up Eugenio, a man who I've known since 1974. And this is one of those initiates. No, it's not true that they're kept in the darkness for 18 years, but they are kept within the confines of the ceremonial men's circle for 18 years. This little boy will never step outside of the sacred fields that surround the men's hut for all that time, until he begins his journey of initiation. For that entire time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as he is taught the values of society, including this notion that their prayers alone maintain the cosmic balance. Before we could begin our journey, we had to be cleansed at the portal of the Earth. And it was extraordinary to be taken by a priest. And you see that the priest never wears shoes because holy feet — there must be nothing between the feet and the Earth for a mamo. And this is actually the place where the Great Mother sent the spindle into the world that elevated the mountains and created the homeland that they call the heart of the world. We traveled high into the paramo, and as we crested the hills, we realized that the men were interpreting every single bump on the landscape in terms of their own intense religiosity. And then of course, as we reached our final destination, a place called Mamancana, we were in for a surprise, because the FARC were waiting to kidnap us. And so we ended up being taken aside into these huts, hidden away until the darkness. And then, abandoning all our gear, we were forced to ride out in the middle of the night, in a quite dramatic scene. It's going to look like a John Ford Western. And we ran into a FARC patrol at dawn, so it was quite harrowing. It will be a very interesting film. But what was fascinating is that the minute there was a sense of dangers, the mamos went into a circle of divination. And of course, this is a photograph literally taken the night we were in hiding, as they divine their route to take us out of the mountains. We were able to, because we had trained people in filmmaking, continue with our work, and send our Wiwa and Arhuaco filmmakers to the final sacred lakes to get the last shots for the film, and we followed the rest of the Arhuaco back to the sea, taking the elements from the highlands to the sea. And here you see how their sacred landscape has been covered by brothels and hotels and casinos, and yet, still they pray. And it's an amazing thing to think that this close to Miami, two hours from Miami, there is an entire civilization of people praying every day for your well-being. They call themselves the Elder Brothers. They dismiss the rest of us who have ruined the world as the Younger Brothers. They cannot understand why it is that we do what we do to the Earth. Now, if we slip to another end of the world, I was up in the high Arctic to tell a story about global warming, inspired in part by the former Vice President's wonderful book. And what struck me so extraordinary was to be again with the Inuit — a people who don't fear the cold, but take advantage of it. A people who find a way, with their imagination, to carve life out of that very frozen. A people for whom blood on ice is not a sign of death, but an affirmation of life. And yet tragically, when you now go to those northern communities, you find to your astonishment that whereas the sea ice used to come in in September and stay till July, in a place like Kanak in northern Greenland, it literally comes in now in November and stays until March. So, their entire year has been cut in half. Now, I want to stress that none of these peoples that I've been quickly talking about here are disappearing worlds. These are not dying peoples. On the contrary, you know, if you have the heart to feel and the eyes to see, you discover that the world is not flat. The world remains a rich tapestry. It remains a rich topography of the spirit. These myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being new, failed attempts at being modern. They're unique facets of the human imagination. They're unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, they respond with 6,000 different voices. And collectively, those voices become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. Our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old. That shallow history shouldn't suggest to anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. The myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being us. They are unique answers to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And there is indeed a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it not only plants and animals, but the legacy of humanity's brilliance. Right now, as we sit here in this room, of those 6,000 languages spoken the day that you were born, fully half aren't being taught to children. So, you're living through a time when virtually half of humanity's intellectual, social and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away. This does not have to happen. These peoples are not failed attempts at being modern — quaint and colorful and destined to fade away as if by natural law. In every case, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. That's actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural survival. Thank you very much.

The ancestor of language

Murray Gell-Mann

{0: 'Murray Gell-Mann'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: "Murray Gell-Mann brings visibility to a crucial aspect of our existence that we can't actually see: elemental particles. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for introducing quarks, one of two fundamental ingredients for all matter in the universe."}

2007-03-03

2008-06-11

TED2007

en

['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'eo', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fi', 'fr', 'fr-ca', 'ga', 'gl', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'kk', 'ko', 'ku', 'ky', 'la', 'lt', 'ltg', 'lv', 'mk', 'mr', 'ms', 'my', 'nb', 'ne', 'nl', 'nn', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'ta', 'th', 'tl', 'tr', 'uk', 'ur', 'vi', 'zh', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['culture', 'global issues', 'history', 'language', 'physics']

{161: 'The joy of lexicography', 164: 'What our language habits reveal', 194: 'Beauty, truth and ... physics?', 2359: "Deep under the Earth's surface, discovering beauty and science", 1889: 'My glacier cave discoveries', 1203: 'How language transformed humanity'}

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

After speaking at TED2007 on elegance in physics, the amazing Murray Gell-Mann gives a quick overview of another passionate interest: finding the common ancestry of our modern languages.

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

Turning powerful stats into art

Chris Jordan

{0: 'Chris Jordan'}

{0: ['artist']}

{0: 'Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.'}

2008-02-02

2008-06-15

TED2008

en

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

['art', 'beauty', 'business', 'culture', 'photography', 'plastic', 'statistics']

{56: 'My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education', 69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 248: 'How the news distorts our worldview', 55058: 'The past, present and future of nicotine addiction', 38913: 'What you should know about vaping and e-cigarettes', 2112: 'What do we do with all this big data?'}

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

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics -- like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.

My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday. It's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else. Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety. Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever. And when we do these kind of things, when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors, then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and no one intended. And that's what I look at with my photographic work. This is an image I just recently completed, that is — when you stand back at a distance, it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution. And as you get a little bit closer, it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant, or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange. And as you get all the way up close, you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups. And in fact, this is one million plastic cups, which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours. We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled. They just don't do that in that industry. Now, that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee. I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas, but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like. That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption. And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life, that's the size it would be. And there's an hour's worth of our cups. And there's a day's worth of our cups. You can still see the little people way down there. That's as high as a 42-story building, and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference. Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now, has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth. One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison are Americans, imprisoned in our country. And I wanted to show the number. The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005. And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet. So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms, and in the actual print of this piece, each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge. They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material, and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print. And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide. This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York — those are my parents looking at the piece. (Laughter) Every time I look at this piece, I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad, "He finally folded his laundry." (Laughter) I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction. And this particular one is about cigarette addiction. I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes. And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes. And, as you slowly step back, you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "Skull with Cigarette." It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9/11, when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died. And do you remember the response? It reverberated around the world, and will continue to reverberate through time. It will be something that we talk about in 100 years. And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died. And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking. And we aren't talking about it — we dismiss it. The tobacco lobby, it's too strong. We just dismiss it out of our consciousness. And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes, we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters, to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking. And this is what the next piece is about. This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes, which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S. More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year. One more strange epidemic in the United States that I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin. Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times. (Laughter) And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills, which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the United States, attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. — and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything — one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications. A strange phenomenon. This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon, this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery. 384,000 women, American women, last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery. It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift, given to young girls who are about to go off to college. So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls, and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern, and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls, which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month. The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21. And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction, and most of that is being done by men. Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples. I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues. They're just examples. And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now. There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview, this holoptical worldview, this holographic image that we're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers. As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend. We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they'll matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that, then we'll be able to find, within each one of us, what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: how do we change? That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: how do we change? How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior? My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now. And if there are things that we see that we don't like about our culture, then we have a choice. The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon, as we show up for the question of how do we change — it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that, on into the future. And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. I'm not speaking abstractly about this, I'm speaking — this is who we are in this room, right now, in this moment. Thank you and good afternoon. (Applause)

The birth of the computer

George Dyson

{0: 'George Dyson'}

{0: ['historian of science']}

{0: 'In telling stories of technologies and the individuals who created them, George Dyson takes a clear-eyed view of our scientific past -- while illuminating what lies ahead.'}

2003-03-03

2008-06-15

TED2003

en

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

['computers', 'engineering', 'history', 'library', 'military', 'science', 'software', 'technology']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 35: 'How we discovered DNA', 230: '5 predictions, from 1984', 1517: 'The greatest machine that never was', 2787: "Don't fear intelligent machines. Work with them", 2548: "The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't"}

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

Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.

Last year, I told you the story, in seven minutes, of Project Orion, which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked, but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened. So it didn't happen. It was a dream that did not happen. This year I'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing. This was a perfect introduction. And it's a story that did work. It did happen, and the machines are all around us. And it was a technology that was inevitable. If the people I'm going to tell you the story about, if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So, it was sort of the right idea at the right time. This is Barricelli's universe. This is the universe we live in now. It's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things, including changing biology. I'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at Trinity, which was the Manhattan Project. It was a little bit like TED: it brought a whole lot of very smart people together. And three of the smartest people were Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. And it was Von Neumann who said, after the bomb, he was working on something much more important than bombs: he's thinking about computers. So, he wasn't only thinking about them; he built one. This is the machine he built. (Laughter) He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution. And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tracks. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons. And then we jump to Von Neumann, 1945, when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing. And 1945, after the war, the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine. So June 1945 — actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet — and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, finite state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out. The other sort of genesis of what Von Neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather. Lewis Richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people, giving them each a little chunk, and putting it together. Here, we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will, but capable of only two ideas. (Laughter) And that's really the simplest computer. It's basically why you need the qubit, because it only has two ideas. And you put lots of those together, you get the essentials of the modern computer: the arithmetic unit, the central control, the memory, the recording medium, the input and the output. But, there's one catch. This is the fatal — you know, we saw it in starting these programs up. The instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail. So, the programming has to be perfect, or it won't work. If you look at the origins of this, the classic history sort of takes it all back to the ENIAC here. But actually, the machine I'm going to tell you about, the Institute for Advanced Study machine, which is way up there, really should be down there. So, I'm trying to revise history, and give some of these guys more credit than they've had. Such a computer would open up universes, which are, at the present, outside the range of any instruments. So it opens up a whole new world, and these people saw it. The guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle, Vladimir Zworykin, from RCA. RCA, in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time, decided not to go into computers. But the first meetings, November 1945, were at RCA's offices. RCA started this whole thing off, and said, you know, televisions are the future, not computers. The essentials were all there — all the things that make these machines run. Von Neumann, and a logician, and a mathematician from the army put this together. Then, they needed a place to build it. When RCA said no, that's when they decided to build it in Princeton, where Freeman works at the Institute. That's where I grew up as a kid. That's me, that's my sister Esther, who's talked to you before, so we both go back to the birth of this thing. That's Freeman, a long time ago, and that was me. And this is Von Neumann and Morgenstern, who wrote the "Theory of Games." All these forces came together there, in Princeton. Oppenheimer, who had built the bomb. The machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations. And Julian Bigelow, who took Zworkykin's place as the engineer, to actually figure out, using electronics, how you would build this thing. The whole gang of people who came to work on this, and women in front, who actually did most of the coding, were the first programmers. These were the prototype geeks, the nerds. They didn't fit in at the Institute. This is a letter from the director, concerned about — "especially unfair on the matter of sugar." (Laughter) You can read the text. (Laughter) This is hackers getting in trouble for the first time. (Laughter). These were not theoretical physicists. They were real soldering-gun type guys, and they actually built this thing. And we take it for granted now, that each of these machines has billions of transistors, doing billions of cycles per second without failing. They were using vacuum tubes, very narrow, sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes. They actually used 6J6, the common radio tube, because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes. And what they did at the Institute was publish every step of the way. Reports were issued, so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world. And it really was. It was the original microprocessor. All the computers now are copies of that machine. The memory was in cathode ray tubes — a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube — very, very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. So, there's 40 of these tubes, like a V-40 engine running the memory. (Laughter) The input and the output was by teletype tape at first. This is a wire drive, using bicycle wheels. This is the archetype of the hard disk that's in your machine now. Then they switched to a magnetic drum. This is modifying IBM equipment, which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry, later at IBM. And this is the beginning of computer graphics. The "Graph'g-Beam Turn On." This next slide, that's the — as far as I know — the first digital bitmap display, 1954. So, Von Neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud, doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components. Those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks, trying to get this thing to work, with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time. And that's what I've been doing, this last six months, is going through the logs. "Running time: two minutes. Input, output: 90 minutes." This includes a large amount of human error. So they are always trying to figure out, what's machine error? What's human error? What's code, what's hardware? That's an engineer gazing at tube number 36, trying to figure out why the memory's not in focus. He had to focus the memory — seems OK. So, he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running, let alone having, you know, software problems. "No use, went home." (Laughter) "Impossible to follow the damn thing, where's a directory?" So, already, they're complaining about the manuals: "before closing down in disgust ... " "The General Arithmetic: Operating Logs." Burning lots of midnight oil. "MANIAC," which became the acronym for the machine, Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator, "lost its memory." "MANIAC regained its memory, when the power went off." "Machine or human?" "Aha!" So, they figured out it's a code problem. "Found trouble in code, I hope." "Code error, machine not guilty." "Damn it, I can be just as stubborn as this thing." (Laughter) "And the dawn came." So they ran all night. Twenty-four hours a day, this thing was running, mainly running bomb calculations. "Everything up to this point is wasted time." "What's the use? Good night." "Master control off. The hell with it. Way off." (Laughter) "Something's wrong with the air conditioner — smell of burning V-belts in the air." "A short — do not turn the machine on." "IBM machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards. The tar is from the roof." So they really were working under tough conditions. (Laughter) Here, "A mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack, set blower to vibrating. Result: no more mouse." (Laughter) "Here lies mouse. Born: ?. Died: 4:50 a.m., May 1953." (Laughter) There's an inside joke someone has penciled in: "Here lies Marston Mouse." If you're a mathematician, you get that, because Marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there. "Picked a lightning bug off the drum." "Running at two kilocycles." That's two thousand cycles per second — "yes, I'm chicken" — so two kilocycles was slow speed. The high speed was 16 kilocycles. I don't know if you remember a Mac that was 16 Megahertz, that's slow speed. "I have now duplicated both results. How will I know which is right, assuming one result is correct? This now is the third different output. I know when I'm licked." (Laughter) "We've duplicated errors before." "Machine run, fine. Code isn't." "Only happens when the machine is running." And sometimes things are okay. "Machine a thing of beauty, and a joy forever." "Perfect running." "Parting thought: when there's bigger and better errors, we'll have them." So, nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs. They're designing hydrogen bombs. But someone in the logbook, late one night, finally drew a bomb. So, that was the result. It was Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, in 1952. That was designed on that machine, in the woods behind the Institute. So Von Neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems. Barricelli, he came to do what we now call, really, artificial life, trying to see if, in this artificial universe — he was a viral-geneticist, way, way, way ahead of his time. He's still ahead of some of the stuff that's being done now. Trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer. Began — his universe started March 3, '53. So it's almost exactly — it's 50 years ago next Tuesday, I guess. And he saw everything in terms of — he could read the binary code straight off the machine. He had a wonderful rapport. Other people couldn't get the machine running. It always worked for him. Even errors were duplicated. (Laughter) "Dr. Barricelli claims machine is wrong, code is right." So he designed this universe, and ran it. When the bomb people went home, he was allowed in there. He would run that thing all night long, running these things, if anybody remembers Stephen Wolfram, who reinvented this stuff. And he published it. It wasn't locked up and disappeared. It was published in the literature. "If it's that easy to create living organisms, why not create a few yourself?" So, he decided to give it a try, to start this artificial biology going in the machines. And he found all these, sort of — it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny, 5,000-byte universe, and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world, in biology. This is some of the generations of his universe. But they're just going to stay numbers; they're not going to become organisms. They have to have something. You have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype. They have to go out and do something. And he started doing that, started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with — playing chess with other machines and so on. And they did start to evolve. And he went around the country after that. Every time there was a new, fast machine, he started using it, and saw exactly what's happening now. That the programs, instead of being turned off — when you quit the program, you'd keep running and, basically, all the sorts of things like Windows is doing, running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines, he envisioned all that happening. And he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process. It wasn't any sort of creator intelligence, but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence. And he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike, or a new kind of life. It just was another version of the same thing happening. And there's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago. And could you do it again now? So, when I went into these archives looking at this stuff, lo and behold, the archivist came up one day, saying, "I think we found another box that had been thrown out." And it was his universe on punch cards. So there it is, 50 years later, sitting there — sort of suspended animation. That's the instructions for running — this is actually the source code for one of those universes, with a note from the engineers saying they're having some problems. "There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet." And I think that's really the truth. We still don't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity. What's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive? These cards, now, thanks to me showing up, are being saved. And the question is, should we run them or not? You know, could we get them running? Do you want to let it loose on the Internet? These machines would think they — these organisms, if they came back to life now — whether they've died and gone to heaven, there's a universe. My laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when Barricelli quit the project. He was thinking far ahead, to how this would really grow into a new kind of life. And that's what's happening! When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth, of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab, that's what Barricelli imagined: that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code — it already is coding from nucleic acids. We've been doing that since, you know, since we started PCR and synthesizing small strings of DNA. And real soon, we're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins, and, like Steve showed us, that just opens an entirely new world. It's a world that Von Neumann himself envisioned. This was published after he died: his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines, what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce. It took really three people: Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing; Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines — that now, last count, four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours; and Julian Bigelow, who died 10 days ago — this is John Markoff's obituary for him — he was the important missing link, the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work. And all our computers have, inside them, the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day, sort of on pencil and paper. And we owe a tremendous credit to that. And he explained, in a very generous way, the spirit that brought all these different people to the Institute for Advanced Study in the '40s to do this project, and make it freely available with no patents, no restrictions, no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world. That's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down, July 1958. And it's Julian Bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off. And that's the end. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Your genes are not your fate

Dean Ornish

{0: 'Dean Ornish'}

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

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

2008-03-03

2008-06-16

TED2008

en

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

['aging', 'genetics', 'health', 'health care', 'medicine', 'science']

{377: 'Healing through diet', 39: 'A roadmap to end aging', 142: 'The potential of regenerative medicine', 1274: 'Experiments that hint of longer lives', 1267: 'A map of the brain', 1648: 'Could the sun be good for your heart?'}

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

Dean Ornish shares new research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle habits can affect a person at a genetic level. For instance, he says, when you live healthier, eat better, exercise, and love more, your brain cells actually increase.

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

Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity

Robert Full

{0: 'Robert Full'}

{0: ['biologist']}

{0: "Robert Full studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build tomorrow's robots, based on evolution's ancient engineering."}

2002-02-02

2008-06-19

TED2002

en

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

['animals', 'design', 'evolution', 'robots', 'science', 'technology', 'transportation']

{82: 'Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers', 165: 'Building "self-aware" robots', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 195: 'The sticky wonder of gecko feet', 2014: "The secrets of nature's grossest creatures, channeled into robots", 571: "Learning from the gecko's tail"}

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

Insects and animals have evolved some amazing skills -- but, as Robert Full notes, many animals are actually over-engineered. The trick is to copy only what's necessary. He shows how human engineers can learn from animals' tricks.

Welcome. If I could have the first slide, please? Contrary to calculations made by some engineers, bees can fly, dolphins can swim, and geckos can even climb up the smoothest surfaces. Now, what I want to do, in the short time I have, is to try to allow each of you to experience the thrill of revealing nature's design. I get to do this all the time, and it's just incredible. I want to try to share just a little bit of that with you in this presentation. The challenge of looking at nature's designs — and I'll tell you the way that we perceive it, and the way we've used it. The challenge, of course, is to answer this question: what permits this extraordinary performance of animals that allows them basically to go anywhere? And if we could figure that out, how can we implement those designs? Well, many biologists will tell engineers, and others, organisms have millions of years to get it right; they're spectacular; they can do everything wonderfully well. So, the answer is bio-mimicry: just copy nature directly. We know from working on animals that the truth is that's exactly what you don't want to do — because evolution works on the just-good-enough principle, not on a perfecting principle. And the constraints in building any organism, when you look at it, are really severe. Natural technologies have incredible constraints. Think about it. If you were an engineer and I told you that you had to build an automobile, but it had to start off to be this big, then it had to grow to be full size and had to work every step along the way. Or think about the fact that if you build an automobile, I'll tell you that you also — inside it — have to put a factory that allows you to make another automobile. (Laughter) And you can absolutely never, absolutely never, because of history and the inherited plan, start with a clean slate. So, organisms have this important history. Really evolution works more like a tinkerer than an engineer. And this is really important when you begin to look at animals. Instead, we believe you need to be inspired by biology. You need to discover the general principles of nature, and then use these analogies when they're advantageous. This is a real challenge to do this, because animals, when you start to really look inside them — how they work — appear hopelessly complex. There's no detailed history of the design plans, you can't go look it up anywhere. They have way too many motions for their joints, too many muscles. Even the simplest animal we think of, something like an insect, and they have more neurons and connections than you can imagine. How can you make sense of this? Well, we believed — and we hypothesized — that one way animals could work simply, is if the control of their movements tended to be built into their bodies themselves. What we discovered was that two-, four-, six- and eight-legged animals all produce the same forces on the ground when they move. They all work like this kangaroo, they bounce. And they can be modeled by a spring-mass system that we call the spring mass system because we're biomechanists. It's actually a pogo stick. They all produce the pattern of a pogo stick. How is that true? Well, a human, one of your legs works like two legs of a trotting dog, or works like three legs, together as one, of a trotting insect, or four legs as one of a trotting crab. And then they alternate in their propulsion, but the patterns are all the same. Almost every organism we've looked at this way — you'll see next week, I'll give you a hint, there'll be an article coming out that says that really big things like T. rex probably couldn't do this, but you'll see that next week. Now, what's interesting is the animals, then — we said — bounce along the vertical plane this way, and in our collaborations with Pixar, in "A Bug's Life," we discussed the bipedal nature of the characters of the ants. And we told them, of course, they move in another plane as well. And they asked us this question. They say, "Why model just in the sagittal plane or the vertical plane, when you're telling us these animals are moving in the horizontal plane?" This is a good question. Nobody in biology ever modeled it this way. We took their advice and we modeled the animals moving in the horizontal plane as well. We took their three legs, we collapsed them down as one. We got some of the best mathematicians in the world from Princeton to work on this problem. And we were able to create a model where animals are not only bouncing up and down, but they're also bouncing side to side at the same time. And many organisms fit this kind of pattern. Now, why is this important to have this model? Because it's very interesting. When you take this model and you perturb it, you give it a push, as it bumps into something, it self-stabilizes, with no brain or no reflexes, just by the structure alone. It's a beautiful model. Let's look at the mathematics. (Laughter) That's enough! (Laughter) The animals, when you look at them running, appear to be self-stabilizing like this, using basically springy legs. That is, the legs can do computations on their own; the control algorithms, in a sense, are embedded in the form of the animal itself. Why haven't we been more inspired by nature and these kinds of discoveries? Well, I would argue that human technologies are really different from natural technologies, at least they have been so far. Think about the typical kind of robot that you see. Human technologies have tended to be large, flat, with right angles, stiff, made of metal. They have rolling devices and axles. There are very few motors, very few sensors. Whereas nature tends to be small, and curved, and it bends and twists, and has legs instead, and appendages, and has many muscles and many, many sensors. So it's a very different design. However, what's changing, what's really exciting — and I'll show you some of that next — is that as human technology takes on more of the characteristics of nature, then nature really can become a much more useful teacher. And here's one example that's really exciting. This is a collaboration we have with Stanford. And they developed this new technique, called Shape Deposition Manufacturing. It's a technique where they can mix materials together and mold any shape that they like, and put in the material properties. They can embed sensors and actuators right in the form itself. For example, here's a leg: the clear part is stiff, the white part is compliant, and you don't need any axles there or anything. It just bends by itself beautifully. So, you can put those properties in. It inspired them to show off this design by producing a little robot they named Sprawl. Our work has also inspired another robot, a biologically inspired bouncing robot, from the University of Michigan and McGill named RHex, for robot hexapod, and this one's autonomous. Let's go to the video, and let me show you some of these animals moving and then some of the simple robots that have been inspired by our discoveries. Here's what some of you did this morning, although you did it outside, not on a treadmill. Here's what we do. (Laughter) This is a death's head cockroach. This is an American cockroach you think you don't have in your kitchen. This is an eight-legged scorpion, six-legged ant, forty-four-legged centipede. Now, I said all these animals are sort of working like pogo sticks — they're bouncing along as they move. And you can see that in this ghost crab, from the beaches of Panama and North Carolina. It goes up to four meters per second when it runs. It actually leaps into the air, and has aerial phases when it does it, like a horse, and you'll see it's bouncing here. What we discovered is whether you look at the leg of a human like Richard, or a cockroach, or a crab, or a kangaroo, the relative leg stiffness of that spring is the same for everything we've seen so far. Now, what good are springy legs then? What can they do? Well, we wanted to see if they allowed the animals to have greater stability and maneuverability. So, we built a terrain that had obstacles three times the hip height of the animals that we're looking at. And we were certain they couldn't do this. And here's what they did. The animal ran over it and it didn't even slow down! It didn't decrease its preferred speed at all. We couldn't believe that it could do this. It said to us that if you could build a robot with very simple, springy legs, you could make it as maneuverable as any that's ever been built. Here's the first example of that. This is the Stanford Shape Deposition Manufactured robot, named Sprawl. It has six legs — there are the tuned, springy legs. It moves in a gait that an insect uses, and here it is going on the treadmill. Now, what's important about this robot, compared to other robots, is that it can't see anything, it can't feel anything, it doesn't have a brain, yet it can maneuver over these obstacles without any difficulty whatsoever. It's this technique of building the properties into the form. This is a graduate student. This is what he's doing to his thesis project — very robust, if a graduate student does that to his thesis project. (Laughter) This is from McGill and University of Michigan. This is the RHex, making its first outing in a demo. (Laughter) Same principle: it only has six moving parts, six motors, but it has springy, tuned legs. It moves in the gait of the insect. It has the middle leg moving in synchrony with the front, and the hind leg on the other side. Sort of an alternating tripod, and they can negotiate obstacles just like the animal. (Laughter) (Voice: Oh my God.) (Applause) Robert Full: It'll go on different surfaces — here's sand — although we haven't perfected the feet yet, but I'll talk about that later. Here's RHex entering the woods. (Laughter) Again, this robot can't see anything, it can't feel anything, it has no brain. It's just working with a tuned mechanical system, with very simple parts, but inspired from the fundamental dynamics of the animal. (Voice: Ah, I love him, Bob.) RF: Here's it going down a pathway. I presented this to the jet propulsion lab at NASA, and they said that they had no ability to go down craters to look for ice, and life, ultimately, on Mars. And he said — especially with legged-robots, because they're way too complicated. Nothing can do that. And I talk next. I showed them this video with the simple design of RHex here. And just to convince them we should go to Mars in 2011, I tinted the video orange just to give them the sense of being on Mars. (Laughter) (Applause) Another reason why animals have extraordinary performance, and can go anywhere, is because they have an effective interaction with the environment. The animal I'm going to show you, that we studied to look at this, is the gecko. We have one here and notice its position. It's holding on. Now I'm going to challenge you. I'm going show you a video. One of the animals is going to be running on the level, and the other one's going to be running up a wall. Which one's which? They're going at a meter a second. How many think the one on the left is running up the wall? (Applause) Okay. The point is it's really hard to tell, isn't it? It's incredible, we looked at students do this and they couldn't tell. They can run up a wall at a meter a second, 15 steps per second, and they look like they're running on the level. How do they do this? It's just phenomenal. The one on the right was going up the hill. How do they do this? They have bizarre toes. They have toes that uncurl like party favors when you blow them out, and then peel off the surface, like tape. Like if we had a piece of tape now, we'd peel it this way. They do this with their toes. It's bizarre! This peeling inspired iRobot — that we work with — to build Mecho-Geckos. Here's a legged version and a tractor version, or a bulldozer version. Let's see some of the geckos move with some video, and then I'll show you a little bit of a clip of the robots. Here's the gecko running up a vertical surface. There it goes, in real time. There it goes again. Obviously, we have to slow this down a little bit. You can't use regular cameras. You have to take 1,000 pictures per second to see this. And here's some video at 1,000 frames per second. Now, I want you to look at the animal's back. Do you see how much it's bending like that? We can't figure that out — that's an unsolved mystery. We don't know how it works. If you have a son or a daughter that wants to come to Berkeley, come to my lab and we'll figure this out. Okay, send them to Berkeley because that's the next thing I want to do. Here's the gecko mill. (Laughter) It's a see-through treadmill with a see-through treadmill belt, so we can watch the animal's feet, and videotape them through the treadmill belt, to see how they move. Here's the animal that we have here, running on a vertical surface. Pick a foot and try to watch a toe, and see if you can see what the animal's doing. See it uncurl and then peel these toes. It can do this in 14 milliseconds. It's unbelievable. Here are the robots that they inspire, the Mecho-Geckos from iRobot. First we'll see the animals toes peeling — look at that. And here's the peeling action of the Mecho-Gecko. It uses a pressure-sensitive adhesive to do it. Peeling in the animal. Peeling in the Mecho-Gecko — that allows them climb autonomously. Can go on the flat surface, transition to a wall, and then go onto a ceiling. There's the bulldozer version. Now, it doesn't use pressure-sensitive glue. The animal does not use that. But that's what we're limited to, at the moment. What does the animal do? The animal has weird toes. And if you look at the toes, they have these little leaves there, and if you blow them up and zoom in, you'll see that's there's little striations in these leaves. And if you zoom in 270 times, you'll see it looks like a rug. And if you blow that up, and zoom in 900 times, you see there are hairs there, tiny hairs. And if you look carefully, those tiny hairs have striations. And if you zoom in on those 30,000 times, you'll see each hair has split ends. And if you blow those up, they have these little structures on the end. The smallest branch of the hairs looks like spatulae, and an animal like that has one billion of these nano-size split ends, to get very close to the surface. In fact, there's the diameter of your hair — a gecko has two million of these, and each hair has 100 to 1,000 split ends. Think of the contact of that that's possible. We were fortunate to work with another group at Stanford that built us a special manned sensor, that we were able to measure the force of an individual hair. Here's an individual hair with a little split end there. When we measured the forces, they were enormous. They were so large that a patch of hairs about this size — the gecko's foot could support the weight of a small child, about 40 pounds, easily. Now, how do they do it? We've recently discovered this. Do they do it by friction? No, force is too low. Do they do it by electrostatics? No, you can change the charge — they still hold on. Do they do it by interlocking? That's kind of a like a Velcro-like thing. No, you can put them on molecular smooth surfaces — they don't do it. How about suction? They stick on in a vacuum. How about wet adhesion? Or capillary adhesion? They don't have any glue, and they even stick under water just fine. If you put their foot under water, they grab on. How do they do it then? Believe it or not, they grab on by intermolecular forces, by Van der Waals forces. You know, you probably had this a long time ago in chemistry, where you had these two atoms, they're close together, and the electrons are moving around. That tiny force is sufficient to allow them to do that because it's added up so many times with these small structures. What we're doing is, we're taking that inspiration of the hairs, and with another colleague at Berkeley, we're manufacturing them. And just recently we've made a breakthrough, where we now believe we're going to be able to create the first synthetic, self-cleaning, dry adhesive. Many companies are interested in this. (Laughter) We also presented to Nike even. (Laughter) (Applause) We'll see where this goes. We were so excited about this that we realized that that small-size scale — and where everything gets sticky, and gravity doesn't matter anymore — we needed to look at ants and their feet, because one of my other colleagues at Berkeley has built a six-millimeter silicone robot with legs. But it gets stuck. It doesn't move very well. But the ants do, and we'll figure out why, so that ultimately we'll make this move. And imagine: you're going to be able to have swarms of these six-millimeter robots available to run around. Where's this going? I think you can see it already. Clearly, the Internet is already having eyes and ears, you have web cams and so forth. But it's going to also have legs and hands. You're going to be able to do programmable work through these kinds of robots, so that you can run, fly and swim anywhere. We saw David Kelly is at the beginning of that with his fish. So, in conclusion, I think the message is clear. If you need a message, if nature's not enough, if you care about search and rescue, or mine clearance, or medicine, or the various things we're working on, we must preserve nature's designs, otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. Thank you. (Applause)

A mobile fridge for vaccines

Adam Grosser

{0: 'Adam Grosser'}

{0: ['venture capitalist']}

{0: 'Adam Grosser is a general partner at Foundation Capital -- and a refrigeration visionary.'}

2007-02-02

2008-06-23

TED2007

en

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

['Vaccines', 'design', 'food', 'global issues', 'invention', 'medicine', 'technology']

{82: 'Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers', 74: 'The route to a sustainable future', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 767: 'Innovating to zero!', 2: 'Simple designs to save a life', 426: 'Play! Experiment! Discover!'}

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

Adam Grosser talks about a project to build a refrigerator that works without electricity -- to bring the vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide. Tweaking some old technology, he's come up with a system that works.

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

Surprising stats about child carseats

Steven Levitt

{0: 'Steven Levitt'}

{0: ['economist']}

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

2005-07-12

2008-06-24

TEDGlobal 2005

en

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

['business', 'cars', 'culture', 'economics', 'parenting', 'statistics', 'transportation']

{29: 'The freakonomics of crack dealing', 67: 'How juries are fooled by statistics', 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 1724: 'If cars could talk, accidents might be avoidable', 1506: 'The future race car -- 150mph, and no driver', 1109: "Google's driverless car"}

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

Steven Levitt shares data that shows car seats are no more effective than seatbelts in protecting kids from dying in cars. However, during the question and answer session, he makes one crucial caveat.

Once upon a time, there was a dread disease that afflicted children. And in fact, among all the diseases that existed in this land, it was the worst. It killed the most children. And along came a brilliant inventor, a scientist, who came up with a partial cure for that disease. And it wasn't perfect. Many children still died, but it was certainly better than what they had before. And one of the good things about this cure was that it was free, virtually free, and was very easy to use. But the worst thing about it was that you couldn't use it on the youngest children, on infants, and on one-year-olds. And so, as a consequence, a few years later, another scientist — perhaps maybe this scientist not quite as brilliant as the one who had preceded him, but building on the invention of the first one — came up with a second cure. And the beauty of the second cure for this disease was that it could be used on infants and one-year-olds. And the problem with this cure was it was very expensive, and it was very complicated to use. And although parents tried as hard as they could to use it properly, almost all of them ended up using it wrong in the end. But what they did, of course, since it was so complicated and expensive, they only used it on the zero-year-olds and the one-year-olds. And they kept on using the existing cure that they had on the two-year-olds and up. And this went on for quite some time. People were happy. They had their two cures. Until a particular mother, whose child had just turned two, died of this disease. And she thought to herself, "My child just turned two, and until the child turned two, I had always used this complicated, expensive cure, you know, this treatment. And then the child turned two, and I started using the cheap and easy treatment, and I wonder" — and she wondered, like all parents who lose children wonder — "if there isn't something that I could have done, like keep on using that complicated, expensive cure." And she told all the other people, and she said, "How could it possibly be that something that's cheap and simple works as well as something that's complicated and expensive?" And the people thought, "You know, you're right. It probably is the wrong thing to do to switch and use the cheap and simple solution." And the government, they heard her story and the other people, and they said, "Yeah, you're right, we should make a law. We should outlaw this cheap and simple treatment and not let anybody use this on their children." And the people were happy. They were satisfied. For many years this went along, and everything was fine. But then along came a lowly economist, who had children himself, and he used the expensive and complicated treatment. But he knew about the cheap and simple one. And he thought about it, and the expensive one didn't seem that great to him. So he thought, "I don't know anything about science, but I do know something about data, so maybe I should go and look at the data and see whether this expensive and complicated treatment actually works any better than the cheap and simple one." And lo and behold, when he went through the data, he found that it didn't look like the expensive, complicated solution was any better than the cheap one, at least for the children who were two and older — the cheap one still didn't work on the kids who were younger. And so, he went forth to the people and he said, "I've made this wonderful finding: it looks as if we could just use the cheap and simple solution, and by doing so we could save ourselves 300 million dollars a year, and we could spend that on our children in other ways." And the parents were very unhappy, and they said, "This is a terrible thing, because how can the cheap and easy thing be as good as the hard thing?" And the government was very upset. And in particular, the people who made this expensive solution were very upset because they thought, "How can we hope to compete with something that's essentially free? We would lose all of our market." And people were very angry, and they called him horrible names. And he decided that maybe he should leave the country for a few days, and seek out some more intelligent, open-minded people in a place called Oxford, and come and try and tell the story at that place. And so, anyway, here I am. It's not a fairy tale. It's a true story about the United States today, and the disease I'm referring to is actually motor vehicle accidents for children. And the free cure is adult seatbelts, and the expensive cure — the 300-million-dollar-a-year cure — is child car seats. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is some of the evidence why I believe this to be true: that for children two years old and up, there really is no real benefit — proven benefit — of car seats, in spite of the incredible energy that has been devoted toward expanding the laws and making it socially unacceptable to put your children into seatbelts. And then talk about why — what is it that makes that true? And then, finally talk a little bit about a third way, about another technology, which is probably better than anything we have, but which — there hasn't been any enthusiasm for adoption precisely because people are so enamored with the current car seat solution. OK. So, many times when you try to do research on data, it records complicated stories — it's hard to find in the data. It doesn't turn out to be the case when you look at seatbelts versus car seats. So the United States keeps a data set of every fatal accident that's happened since 1975. So in every car crash in which at least one person dies, they have information on all of the people. So if you look at that data — it's right up on the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's website — you can just look at the raw data, and begin to get a sense of the limited amount of evidence that's in favor of car seats for children aged two and up. So, here is the data. Here I have, among two- to six-year-olds — anyone above six, basically no one uses car seats, so you can't compare — 29.3 percent of the children who are unrestrained in a crash in which at least one person dies, themselves die. If you put a child in a car seat, 18.2 percent of the children die. If they're wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt, in this raw data, 19.4 percent die. And interestingly, wearing a lap-only seatbelt, 16.7 percent die. And actually, the theory tells you that the lap-only seatbelt's got to be worse than the lap-and-shoulder belt. And that just reminds you that when you deal with raw data, there are hundreds of confounding variables that may be getting in the way. So what we do in the study is — and this is just presenting the same information, but turned into a figure to make it easier. So the yellow bar represents car seats, the orange bar lap-and-shoulder, and the red bar lap-only seatbelts. And this is all relative to unrestrained — the bigger the bar, the better. Okay. So, this is the data I just showed, OK? So the highest bar is what you're striving to beat. So you can control for the basic things, like how hard the crash was, what seat the child was sitting in, etc., the age of the child. And that's that middle set of bars. And so, you can see that the lap-only seatbelts start to look worse once you do that. And then finally, the last set of bars, which are really controlling for everything you could possibly imagine about the crash, 50, 75, 100 different characteristics of the crash. And what you find is that the car seats and the lap-and-shoulder belts, when it comes to saving lives, fatalities look exactly identical. And the standard error bands are relatively small around these estimates as well. And it's not just overall. It's very robust to anything you want to look at. One thing that's interesting: if you look at frontal-impact crashes — when the car crashes, the front hits into something — indeed, what you see is that the car seats look a little bit better. And I think this isn't just chance. In order to have the car seat approved, you need to pass certain federal standards, all of which involve slamming your car into a direct frontal crash. But when you look at other types of crashes, like rear-impact crashes, indeed, the car seats don't perform as well. And I think that's because they've been optimized to pass, as we always expect people to do, to optimize relative to bright-line rules about how affected the car will be. And the other thing you might argue is, "Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. And so if we look at recent crashes — the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data — you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better." But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, actually, are doing even better than the car seats. They say, "Well, that's impossible, that can't be." And the line of argument, if you ask parents, is, "But car seats are so expensive and complicated, and they have this big tangle of latches, how could they possibly not work better than seatbelts because they are so expensive and complicated?" It's kind of an interesting logic, I think, that people use. And the other logic, they say, "Well, the government wouldn't have told us [to] use them if they weren't much better." But what's interesting is the government telling us to use them is not actually based on very much. It really is based on some impassioned pleas of parents whose children died after they turned two, which has led to the passage of all these laws — not very much on data. So you can only get so far, I think, in telling your story by using these abstract statistics. And so I had some friends over to dinner, and I was asking — we had a cookout — I was asking them what advice they might have for me about proving my point. They said, "Why don't you run some crash tests?" And I said, "That's a great idea." So we actually tried to commission some crash tests. And it turns out that as we called around to the independent crash test companies around the country, none of them wanted to do our crash test because they said, some explicitly, some not so explicitly, "All of our business comes from car seat manufacturers. We can't risk alienating them by testing seatbelts relative to car seats." Now, eventually, one did. Under the conditions of anonymity, they said they would be happy to do this test for us — so anonymity, and 1,500 dollars per seat that we crashed. And so, we went to Buffalo, New York, and here is the precursor to it. These are the crash test dummies, waiting for their chance to take the center stage. And then, here's how the crash test works. Here, they don't actually crash the entire car, you know — it's not worth ruining a whole car to do it. So they just have these bench seats, and they strap the car seat and the seatbelt onto it. So I just wanted you to look at this. And I think this gives you a good idea of why parents think car seats are so great. Look at the kid in the car seat. Does he not look content, ready to go, like he could survive anything? And then, if you look at the kid in back, it looks like he's already choking before the crash even happens. It's hard to believe, when you look at this, that that kid in back is going to do very well when you get in a crash. So this is going to be a crash where they're going to slam this thing forward into a wall at 30 miles an hour, and see what happens. OK? So, let me show you what happens. These are three-year-old dummies, by the way. So here — this is the car seat. Now watch two things: watch how the head goes forward, and basically hits the knees — and this is in the car seat — and watch how the car seat flies around, in the rebound, up in the air. The car seat's moving all over the place. Bear in mind there are two things about this. This is a car seat that was installed by someone who has installed 1,000 car seats, who knew exactly how to do it. And also it turned out these bench seats are the very best way to install car seats. Having a flat back makes it much easier to install them. And so this is a test that's very much rigged in favor of the car seat, OK? So, that kid in this crash fared very well. The federal standards are that you have to score below a 1,000 to be an approved car seat on this crash, in some metric of units which are not important. And this crash would have been about a 450. So this car seat was actually an above-average car seat from Consumer Reports, and did quite well. So the next one. Now, this is the kid, same crash, who is in the seatbelt. He hardly moves at all, actually, relative to the other child. The funny thing is, the cam work is terrible because they've only set it up to do the car seats, and so, they actually don't even have a way to move the camera so you can see the kid that's on the rebound. Anyway, it turns out that those two crashes, that actually the three-year-old did slightly worse. So, he gets about a 500 out of — you know, on this range — relative to a 400 and something. But still, if you just took that data from that crash to the federal government, and said, "I have invented a new car seat. I would like you to approve it for selling," then they would say, "This is a fantastic new car seat, it works great. It only got a 500, it could have gotten as high up as a 1,000." And this seatbelt would have passed with flying colors into being approved as a car seat. So, in some sense, what this is suggesting is that it's not just that people are setting up their car seats wrong, which is putting children at risk. It's just that, fundamentally, the car seats aren't doing much. So here's the crash. So these are timed at the same time, so you can see that it takes much longer with the car seat — at rebound, it takes a lot longer — but there's just a lot less movement for child who's in the seatbelt. So, I'll show you the six-year-old crashes as well. The six-year-old is in a car seat, and it turns out that looks terrible, but that's great. That's like a 400, OK? So that kid would do fine in the crash. Nothing about that would have been problematic to the child at all. And then here's the six-year-old in the seatbelt, and in fact, they get exactly within, you know, within one or two points of the same. So really, for the six-year-old, the car seat did absolutely nothing whatsoever. That's some more evidence, so in some sense — I was criticized by a scientist, who said, "You could never publish a study with an n of 4," meaning those four crashes. So I wrote him back and I said, "What about an n of 45,004?" Because I had the other 45,000 other real-world crashes. And I just think that it's interesting that the idea of using real-world crashes, which is very much something that economists think would be the right thing to do, is something that scientists don't actually, usually think — they would rather use a laboratory, a very imperfect science of looking at the dummies, than actually 30 years of data of what we've seen with children and with car seats. And so I think the answer to this puzzle is that there's a much better solution out there, that's gotten nobody excited because everyone is so delighted with the way car seats are presumably working. And if you think from a design perspective, about going back to square one, and say, "I just want to protect kids in the back seat." I don't there's anyone in this room who'd say, "Well, the right way to start would be, let's make a great seat belt for adults. And then, let's make this really big contraption that you have to rig up to it in this daisy chain." I mean, why not start — who's sitting in the back seat anyway except for kids? But essentially, do something like this, which I don't know exactly how much it would cost to do, but there's no reason I could see why this should be much more expensive than a regular car seat. It's just actually — you see, this is folding up — it's behind the seat. You've got a regular seat for adults, and then you fold it down, and the kid sits on top, and it's integrated. It seems to me that this can't be a very expensive solution, and it's got to work better than what we already have. So the question is, is there any hope for adoption of something like this, which would presumably save a lot of lives? And I think the answer, perhaps, lies in a story. The answer both to why has a car seat been so successful, and why this may someday be adopted or not, lies in a story that my dad told me, relating to when he was a doctor in the U.S. Air Force in England. And this is a long time ago: you were allowed to do things then you can't do today. So, my father would have patients come in who he thought were not really sick. And he had a big jar full of placebo pills that he would give them, and he'd say, "Come back in a week, if you still feel lousy." OK, and most of them would not come back, but some of them would come back. And when they came back, he, still convinced they were not sick, had another jar of pills. In this jar were huge horse pills. They were almost impossible to swallow. And these, to me, are the analogy for the car seats. People would look at these and say, "Man, this thing is so big and so hard to swallow. If this doesn't make me feel better, you know, what possibly could?" And it turned out that most people wouldn't come back, because it worked. But every once in a while, there was still a patient convinced that he was sick, and he'd come back. And my dad had a third jar of pills. And the jar of pills he had, he said, were the tiniest little pills he could find, so small you could barely see them. And he would say, listen, I know I gave you that huge pill, that complicated, hard-to-swallow pill before, but now I've got one that's so potent, that is really tiny and small and almost invisible. It's almost like this thing here, which you can't even see." And it turned out that never, in all the times my dad gave out this pill, the really tiny pill, did anyone ever come back still complaining of sickness. So, my dad always took that as evidence that this little, teeny, powerful pill had the ultimate placebo effect. And in some sense, if that's the right story, I think integrated car seats you will see, very quickly, becoming something that everyone has. The other possible conclusion is, well, maybe after coming to my father three times, getting sent home with placebos, he still felt sick, he went and found another doctor. And that's completely possible. And if that's the case, then I think we're stuck with conventional car seats for a long time to come. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Audience: I just wanted to ask you, when we wear seatbelts we don't necessarily wear them just to prevent loss of life, it's also to prevent lots of serious injury. Your data looks at fatalities. It doesn't look at serious injury. Is there any data to show that child seats are actually less effective, or just as effective as seatbelts for serious injury? Because that would prove your case.) Steven Levitt: Yeah, that's a great question. In my data, and in another data set I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, I find very small differences in injury. So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. In the New Jersey data, which is different, because it's not just fatal crashes, but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, but generally they're the minor injuries. Now, what's interesting, I should say this as a disclaimer, there is medical literature that is very difficult to resolve with this other data, which suggests that car seats are dramatically better. And they use a completely different methodology that involves — after the crash occurs, they get from the insurance companies the names of the people who were in the crash, and they call them on the phone, and they asked them what happened. And I really can't resolve, yet, and I'd like to work with these medical researchers to try to understand how there can be these differences, which are completely at odds with one another. But it's obviously a critical question. The question is even if — are there enough serious injuries to make these cost-effective? It's kind of tricky. Even if they're right, it's not so clear that they're so cost-effective.

The transformative power of classical music

Benjamin Zander

{0: 'Benjamin Zander'}

{0: ['conductor']}

{0: 'A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy -- and for his brilliant pre-concert talks.'}

2008-02-02

2008-06-25

TED2008

en

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

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

{103: 'How to truly listen', 45: "An 11-year-old's magical violin", 46: 'Improvising on piano, aged 14', 28953: 'Music with a message should be accessible', 21804: 'How AI could compose a personalized soundtrack to your life', 1440: 'Music and emotion through time'}

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

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote, "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." And the other one wrote, "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." (Laughter) Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome. (Laughter) But it's like an experiment. Now, before we start — (Laughter) Before we start, I need to do two things. One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. Maybe you have this child at home. He sounds something like this. (Music) (Music ends) I see some of you recognize this child. Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this. (Music) (Music ends) He practices for another year and takes lessons — he's nine. (Music) (Music ends) Then he practices for another year and takes lessons — now he's 10. (Music) (Music ends) At that point, they usually give up. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. (Music) (Music ends) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note. (Music) And the second, with an impulse every other note. (Music) You can see it by looking at my head. (Laughter) The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes. (Music) The 10-year-old, on every eight notes. (Music) And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. (Music) I don't know how we got into this position. (Laughter) I didn't say, "I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body." No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing. (Music) It can be the other buttock. (Music) You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. I was working with this young pianist, and said, "The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. You should be a one-buttock player." I moved his body while he was playing. And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. The audience gasped when they heard the difference. Then I got a letter from this gentleman. He said, "I was so moved. I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company." (Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. There are 1,600 people, I believe. My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. You can't imagine your life without classical music. That's the first group, quite small. Then there's another bigger group. The people who don't mind classical music. (Laughter) You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. That's the second group. Now comes the third group: people who never listen to classical music. It's just simply not part of your life. You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport ... (Laughter) — and maybe a little bit of a march from "Aida" when you come into the hall. But otherwise, you never hear it. That's probably the largest group. And then there's a very small group. These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. Actually, I hear a lot, "My husband is tone-deaf." (Laughter) Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. And the telephone. The telephone. If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, "Hello," you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf. But I tell you what. It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and are passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. So that's what we're going to do. Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work, if you look at my face, right? It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, "I have a dream. Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it." (Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. Some of you will know it. (Music) Do you know what I think probably happened here? When I started, you thought, "How beautiful that sounds." (Music) "I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year." (Laughter) It's funny, isn't it? It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. And of course — (Applause) Of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, "Wake up! It's culture!" And then you feel even worse. (Laughter) But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? Did anybody think while I was playing, "Why is he using so many impulses?" If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it. (Music) (Music ends) And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses. So let's see what's really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C. And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn't it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. (Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F. So we have B, A, G, F. And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? (Music) That might have been a fluke. Let's try it again. (Music) Oh, the TED choir. (Laughter) And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? Nobody is. You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China — everybody knows: da, da, da, da — da. Everybody knows, who's expecting that E. Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember? Act One, scene three, he finds out his uncle killed his father. He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. And then he backs away, he goes up to him again, almost kills him. The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, "Hamlet is a procrastinator." Or they say, "Hamlet has an Oedipus complex." No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid. (Laughter) That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet — Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. That's in order to delay — until Act Five, he can kill him. It's the same with the Chopin. He's just about to reach the E, and he says, "Oops, better go back up and do it again." So he does it again. Now, he gets excited. (Music) That's excitement, don't worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord — because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does ... Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. I tell my students, "If you have a deceptive cadence, raise your eyebrows, and everybody will know." (Laughter) (Applause) Right. He gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. Now, he tries E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. And then finally ... There was a gentleman in the front row who went, "Mmm." (Laughter) It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, "Aah, I'm home." Because we all know where home is. So this is a piece which goes from away to home. I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. B, C, B, C, B, C, B — down to A, down to G, down to F. Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. He goes back up to B, he gets very excited. Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. And finally goes to E, and it's home. And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing. (Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. This is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering — (Applause) (Applause ends) You may be wondering why I'm clapping. Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. I did exactly what I did with you, and I explained the whole thing. At the end, they went crazy, clapping. I was clapping. They were clapping. Finally, I said, "Why am I clapping?" And one of them said, "Because we were listening." (Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. Now, that is something. Am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? Of course, I can't be sure. But I'll tell you what happened to me in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them — a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, "You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ..." (Laughter) He said, "My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And it felt really good to cry for my brother." So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. Everybody. Now, how would you walk — my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. They say three percent of the population likes classical music. If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over. (Laughter) How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, "Three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent." How would you walk or talk? How would you be? If you thought, "Everybody loves classical music — they just haven't found out about it yet." See, these are totally different worlds. Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD — (Laughter) But the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life-changing. People in my orchestra said, "Ben, what happened?" That's what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. You could light up a village with this guy's eyes. (Laughter) Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world. Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, we're going back into the world. And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me. So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say — the words that come out of our mouth. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. And ... And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. And she told me this, she said, "We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. He did not survive. And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. She told me this. She said, "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, "I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Now, can we do that? No. And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. But it is a possibility to live into. Thank you. (Applause) Shining eyes. (Applause) Shining eyes. (Applause) Thank you, thank you.

One Laptop per Child, two years on

Nicholas Negroponte

{0: 'Nicholas Negroponte'}

{0: ['tech visionary']}

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

2007-12-12

2008-06-26

EG 2007

en

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

['activism', 'computers', 'design', 'technology', 'Best of the Web']

{230: '5 predictions, from 1984', 266: 'Designing objects that tell stories', 228: 'A powerful idea about ideas', 2043: 'A 30-year history of the future', 172: 'Designing for simplicity', 255: 'The thinking behind 50x15'}

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

Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this far-reaching project.

Most people don't know that when I went to high school in this country — I applied for university at a time when I was convinced I was going to be an artist and be a sculptor. And I came from a very privileged background. I was very lucky. My family was wealthy, and my father believed in one thing, and that was to give us all as much education as we wanted. And I announced I wanted to be a sculptor in Paris. And he was a clever man. He sort of said, "Well, that's OK, but you've done very well in your math SATs." In fact, I'd got an 800. And he thought I did very well — and I did, too — in the arts: this was my passion. And he said "If you go to MIT," to which I had been given early admission, "I will pay for every year you're at MIT, in graduate or undergraduate — as much as you want — I will pay for an equal number of years for you to live in Paris." And I thought that was the best deal in town, so I accepted it immediately. And I decided that if I was good in art, and I was good in mathematics, I'd study architecture, which was the blending of the two. I went and told my headmaster that, at prep school. And I said to him what I was doing, that I was going to go study architecture because it was art and mathematics put together. He said to me something that just went completely over my head. He said, "You know, I like grey suits, and I like pin-striped suits, but I don't like grey pin-striped suits." And I thought, "What a turkey this guy is," and I went off to MIT. I studied architecture, then did a second degree in architecture, and then actually quickly realized that it wasn't architecture. That really, the mixing of art and science was computers, and that that really was the place to bring both, and enjoyed a career doing that. And probably, if I were to fill out Jim Citrin's scale, I'd put 100 percent on the side of the equation where you spend time making it possible for others to be creative. And after doing this for a long time, and the Media Lab passing the baton on, I thought, "Well, maybe it's time for me to do a project. Something that would be important, but also something that would take advantage of all of these privileges that one had." And in the case of the Media Lab, knowing a lot of people, knowing people who were either executives or wealthy, and also not having, in my own case, a career to worry about anymore. My career, I mean, I'd done my career. Didn't have to worry about earning money. Didn't have to worry about what people thought about me. And I said, "Boy, let's really do something that takes advantage of all these features," and thought that if we could address education, by leveraging the children, and bringing to the world the access of the computers, that that was really the thing we should do. Never shown this picture before, and probably going to be sued for it. It's taken at three o'clock in the morning, without the permission of the company. It's about two weeks old. There they are, folks. (Applause) If you look at the picture, you'll see they're stacked up. Those are conveyor belts that go around. This is one of the conveyor belts with the thing going by, but then you'll see the ones up above. What happens is, they burn into flash memory the software, and then test them for a few hours. But you've got to have the thing moving on the assembly line, because it's constant. So they go around in this loop, which is why you see them up there. So this was great for us because it was a real turning point. But it goes back. This picture was taken in 1982, just before the IBM PC was even announced. Seymour Papert and I were bringing computers to schools and developing nations at a time when it was way ahead of itself. But one thing we learned was that these kids can absolutely jump into it just the same way as our kids do here. And when people tell me, "Who's going to teach the teachers to teach the kids?" I say to myself, "What planet do you come from?" Okay, there's not a person in this room — I don't care how techie you are — there's not a person in this room that doesn't give their laptop or cell phone to a kid to help them debug it. OK? We all need help, even those of us who are very seasoned. This picture of Seymour — 25 years ago. Seymour made a very simple observation in 1968, and then basically presented it in 1970 — April 11 to be precise — called "Teaching Children Thinking." What he observed was that kids who write computer programs understand things differently, and when they debug the programs, they come the closest to learning about learning. That was very important, and in some sense, we've lost that. Kids don't program enough and boy, if there's anything I hope this brings back, it's programming to kids. It's really important. Using applications is OK, but programming is absolutely fundamental. This is being launched with three languages in it: Squeak, Logo, and a third, that I've never even seen before. The point being, this is going to be very, very intensive on the programming side. This photograph is very important because it's much later. This is in the early 2000s. My son, Dimitri — who's here, many of you know Dimitri — went to Cambodia, set up this school that we had built, just as the school connected it to the Internet. And these kids had their laptops. But it was really what spirited this, plus the influence of Joe and others. We started One Laptop per Child. This is the same village in Cambodia, just a couple of months ago. These kids are real pros. There were just 7,000 machines out there being tested by kids. Being a nonprofit is absolutely fundamental. Everybody advised me not to be a nonprofit, but they were all wrong. And the reason being a nonprofit is important is actually twofold. There are many reasons, but the two that merit the little bit of time is: one, the clarity of purpose is there. The moral purpose is clear. I can see any head of state, any executive I want, at any time, because I'm not selling laptops. OK? I have no shareholders. Whether we sell, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever. The clarity of purpose is absolutely critical. And the second is very counterintuitive — you can get the best people in the world. If you look at our professional services, including search firms, including communications, including legal services, including banking, they're all pro bono. And it's not to save money. We've got money in the bank. It's because you get the best people. You get the people who are doing it because they believe in the mission, and they're the best people. We couldn't afford to hire a CFO. We put out a job description for a CFO at zero salary, and we had a queue of people. It allows you to team up with people. The U.N.'s not going to be our partner if we're profit making. So announcing this with Kofi Annan was very important, and the U.N. allowed us to basically reach all the countries. And this was the machine we were showing before I met Yves Behar. And while this machine in some sense is silly, in retrospect, it actually served a very important purpose. That pencil-yellow crank was remembered by everybody. Everybody remembered the pencil-yellow crank. It's different. It was getting its power in a different way. It's kind of childlike. Even though this wasn't the direction we went because the crank — it really is stupid to have it on board, by the way. In spite of what some people in the press don't get it, didn't understand it, we didn't take it off because we didn't want to do — having it on the laptop itself is really not what you want. You want a separate thing, like the AC adaptor. I didn't bring one with me, but they really work much better off-board. And then, I could tell you lots about the laptop, but I decided on just four things. Just keep in mind — because there are other people, including Bill Gates, who said, "Gee, you've got a real computer." That computer is unlike anything you've had, and does things — there are four of them — that you don't come close to. And it's very important to be low power, and I hope that's picked up more by the industry. That the reason that you want to be below two watts is that's roughly what you can generate with your upper body. Dual-mode display — that sunlight display's fantastic. We were using it at lunch today in the sunlight, and the more sunlight the better. And that was really critical. The mesh network, it'll become commonplace. And of course, "rugged" goes without saying. And the reason I think design matters isn't because I wanted to go to art school. And by the way, when I graduated from MIT, I thought the worst and silliest thing to do would be to go to Paris for six years. (Laughter) So, I didn't do that. But design matters for a number of reasons. The most important being that it is the best way to make an inexpensive product. Most people make inexpensive products by taking cheap design, cheap labor, cheap components, and making a cheap laptop. And, in English, the word "cheap" has a double meaning, which is really appropriate, because it's cheap, in the pejorative sense, as well as inexpensive. But if you take a different approach, and you think of very large-scale integration, very advanced materials, very advanced manufacturing — so you're pouring chemicals in one end, iPods are spewing out the other — and really cool design, that's what we wanted to do. And I can race through these and save a lot of time because Yves and I obviously didn't compare notes. These are his slides, and so I don't have to talk about them. But it was really, to us, very important as a strategy. It wasn't just to kind of make it cute, because somebody — you know, good design is very important. Yves showed one of the power-generating devices. The mesh network, the reason I — and I won't go into it in great detail — but when we deliver laptops to kids in the remotest and poorest parts of the world, they're connected. There's not just laptops. And so, we have to drop in satellite dishes. We put in generators. It's a lot of stuff that goes behind these. These can talk to each other. If you're in a desert, they can talk to each other about two kilometers apart. If you're in the jungle, it's about 500 meters. So if a kid bicycles home, or walks a few miles, they're going to be off the grid, so to speak. They're not going to be near another laptop, so you have to nail these onto a tree, and sort of, get it. You don't call Verizon or Sprint. You build your own network. And that's very important, the user interface. We are launching with 18 keyboards. English is by far the minority. Latin is relatively rare, too. You just look at some of the languages. I'm willing to suspect some of you hadn't even heard of them before. Is there anybody in the room, one person, unless you work with OLPC, is there anybody in the room that can tell me what language the keyboard is that's on the screen? There's only one hand — so you get it. Yes, you're right. He's right. It's Amharic, it's Ethiopian. In Ethiopia, there's never been a keyboard. There is no keyboard standard because there's no market. And this is the big difference. Again, when you're a nonprofit, you look at children as a mission, not as a market. So we went to Ethiopia, and we helped them make a keyboard. And this will become the standard Ethiopian keyboard. So what I want to end with is sort of what we're doing to roll it out. And we changed strategy completely. I decided at the beginning — it was a pretty good thing to decide in the beginning, it's not what we're doing now — is to go to six countries. Big countries, one of them is not so big, but it's rich. Here's the six. We went to the six, and in each case the head of state said he would do it, he'd do a million. In the case of Gaddafi, he'd do 1.2 million, and that they would launch it. We thought, this is exactly the right strategy, get it out, and then the little countries could sort of piggyback on these big countries. And so I went to each of those countries at least six times, met with the head of state probably two or three times. In each case, got the ministers, went through a lot of the stuff. This was a period in my life where I was traveling 330 days per year. Not something you'd envy or want to do. In the case of Libya, it was a lot of fun meeting Gaddafi in his tent. The camel smells were unbelievable. And it was 45 degrees C. I mean, this was not what you'd call a cool experience. And former countries — I say former, because none of them really came through this summer — there was a big difference between getting a head of state to have a photo opportunity, make a press release. So we went to smaller ones. Uruguay, bless their hearts. Small country, not so rich. President said he'd do it, and guess what? He did do it. The tender had nothing in it that related to us, nothing specific about sunlight-readable, mesh-network, low-power, but just a vanilla laptop proposal. And guess what? We won it hands down. When it was announced that they were going to do every child in Uruguay, the first 100,000, boom, went to OLPC. The next day — the next day, not even 24 hours had passed — in Peru, the president of Peru said, "We'll do 250." And boom, a little domino effect. The president of Rwanda stepped in and said he would do it. The president of Ethiopia said he would do it. And boom, boom, boom. The president of Mongolia. And so what happens is, these things start to happen with these countries — still not enough. Add up all those countries, it didn't quite get to thing, so we said, "Let's start a program in the United States." So, end of August, early September, we decide to do this. We announced it near the middle, end — just when the Clinton Initiative was taking place. We thought that was a good time to announce it. Launched it on the 12 of November. We said it would be just for a short period until the 26. We've extended it until the 31. And the "Give One, Get One" program is really important because it got a lot of people absolutely interested. The first day it was just wild. And then we said, "Well, let's get people to give many. Not just one, and get one, but maybe give 100, give 1,000." And that's where you come in. And that's where I think it's very important. I don't want you all to go out and buy 400 dollars worth of laptops. Okay? Do it, but that's not going to help. Okay? If everybody in this room goes out tonight and orders one of these things for 400 dollars, whatever it is, 300 people in the room doing it — yeah, great. I want you do something else. And it's not to go out and buy 100 or 1,000, though, I invite you to do that, and 10,000 would be even better. Tell people about it! It's got to become viral, OK? Use your mailing lists. People in this room have extraordinary mailing lists. Get your friends to give one, get one. And if each one of you sends it to 300 or 400 people, that would be fantastic. I won't dwell on the pricing at all. Just to say that when you do the "Give One, Get One," a lot of press is a bit about, "They didn't make it, it's 188 dollars, it's not 100." It will be 100 in two years. It will go below 100. We've pledged not to add features, but to bring that price down. But it was the countries that wanted it to go up, and we let them push it up for all sorts of reasons. So what you can do — I've just said it. Don't just give one, get one. I just want to end with one last one. This one is not even 24-hours old, or maybe it's 24-hours. The first kids got their laptops. They got them by ship, and I'm talking now about 7,000, 8,000 at a time went out this week. They went to Uruguay, Peru, Mexico. And it's been slow coming, and we're only making about 5,000 a week, but we hope, we hope, sometime in next year, maybe by the middle of the year, to hit a million a month. Now put that number, and a million isn't so much. It's not a big number. We're selling a billion cell phones worldwide this year. But a million a month in laptop-land is a big number. And the world production today, everybody combined, making laptops, is five million a month. So I'm standing here telling you that sometime next year, we're going to make 20 percent of the world production. And if we do that, there are going to be a lot of lucky kids out there. And we hope if you have EG two years from now, or whenever you have it again, I won't have bad breath, and I will be invited back, and will have, hopefully by then, maybe 100 million out there to children. Thank you. (Applause)

"Clonie"

Nellie McKay

{0: 'Nellie McKay'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter']}

{0: 'Nellie McKay sings, croons, raps, grooves and -- barks? -- to glowing critical acclaim.'}

2008-02-29

2008-06-27

TED2008

en

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

['culture', 'entertainment', 'genetics', 'live music', 'piano', 'science', 'singer']

{325: '"The Dog Song"', 296: '"Mother of Pearl," "If I Had You"', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 80: 'The life code that will reshape the future', 1509: 'Experiments that point to a new understanding of cancer', 30303: 'How CRISPR lets you edit DNA'}

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

Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay performs the semi-serious song "Clonie" -- about creating the ultimate companion.

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

Stephen Hawking's zero g flight

Peter Diamandis

{0: 'Peter Diamandis'}

{0: ['space activist']}

{0: 'Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which offers large cash incentive prizes to inventors who can solve grand challenges like space flight, low-cost mobile medical diagnostics and oil spill cleanup. He is the chair of Singularity University, which teaches executives and grad students about exponentially growing technologies.'}

2008-02-02

2008-06-30

TED2008

en

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

['business', 'flight', 'science', 'space', 'technology', 'universe']

{242: 'Questioning the universe', 178: 'This is Saturn', 4: 'The real future of space exploration', 1402: 'From mach-20 glider to hummingbird drone', 429: 'My dream of a flying car', 335: 'Our next giant leap'}

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

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis talks about how he helped Stephen Hawking fulfill his dream of going to space -- by flying together into the upper atmosphere and experiencing weightlessness at zero g.

Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier. So when I had the chance to give the world's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity, it was incredible. And I want to tell you that story. I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. It's a competition we're holding, the second X PRIZE, for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. We have something called the Genome 100 — 100 individuals we're sequencing as part of that. Craig Venter chairs that event. And I met Professor Hawking, and he said his dream was to travel into space. And I said, "I can't take you there, but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g. And he said, on the spot, "Absolutely, yes." Well, the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight, weightless flight. You take an airplane, you fly over the top, you're weightless for 25 seconds. Come back down, you weigh twice as much. You do it again and again. You can get eight, 10 minutes of weightlessness — how NASA's trained their astronauts for so long. We set out to do this. It took us 11 years to become operational. And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking. We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say, you're crazy, don't do that, you're going kill the guy. (Laughter) And he wanted to go. We worked hard to get all the permissions. And six months later, we sat down at Kennedy Space Center. We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero-g. And if it went really well, we might do three parabolas. Well, we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this. And what he said, for me, was very moving. He said, "Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space." We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center, up inside the NASA vehicle, into the back of the zero-g airplane. We had about 20 people who made donations — we raised $150,000 in donations for children's charities — who flew with us. A few TEDsters here. We set up a whole ER. We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane. We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood, his heart rate, his blood pressure. We had everything all set in case of an emergency; God knows, you don't want to hurt this world-renowned expert. We took off from the shuttle landing facility, where the shuttle takes off and lands. And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g. Once he was there, [we] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like. And after that first parabola, you know, the doc said everything is great. He was smiling, and we said go. So we did a second parabola. (Laughter) (Applause) And a third. (Applause) We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did. And we did a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth. (Laughter) And a seventh and an eighth. And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man. (Laughter) He was so happy. We are living on a precious jewel, and it's during our lifetime that we're moving off this planet. Please join us in this epic adventure. Thank you so much. (Applause)

The story of a girl

Rick Smolan

{0: 'Rick Smolan'}

{0: ['photographer']}

{0: 'Rick Smolan is the co-founder of the America 24/7 and Day in the Life photography series -- and a natural storyteller in many media. His latest books are America at Home and Blue Planet Run.'}

2007-12-12

2008-07-02

EG 2007

en

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

['art', 'children', 'family', 'global issues', 'media', 'photography', 'storytelling', 'Best of the Web']

{34: 'Photos of endangered cultures', 279: 'Turning powerful stats into art', 324: 'How photography connects us', 1789: 'Where is home?', 2282: 'When to take a stand -- and when to let it go', 1369: 'The sibling bond'}

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

Photographer Rick Smolan tells the unforgettable story of a young Amerasian girl, a fateful photograph, and an adoption saga with a twist.

Some of you have heard the story before, but, in fact, there's somebody in the audience who's never heard this story in front of an audience before, so I'm a little more nervous than I normally am telling this story. I used to be a photographer for many years. In 1978, I was working for "TIME Magazine" and I was given a three-day assignment to photograph Amerasian children, children who had been fathered by American GIs all over Southeast Asia, and then abandoned — 40,000 children all over Asia. I had never heard the word Amerasian before. I spent a few days photographing children in different countries, and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists, I always hoped that when my pictures are published, they might actually have an effect on a situation, instead of just documenting it. So, I was so disturbed by what I saw and I was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards, that I decided I would take six months off. I was 28 years old. I decided I would find six children in different countries, and actually go spend some time with the kids, and try to tell their story a little bit better than I thought I had done for Time magazine. In the course of doing the story, I was looking for children who hadn't been photographed before, and the Pearl Buck Foundation told me that they worked with a lot of Americans who were donating money to help some of these kids. And a man told me, who ran the Pearl Buck Foundation in Korea, that there was a young girl, who was 11 years old, being raised by her grandmother. And the grandmother had never let any Westerners see her. Every time any Westerners came to the village, she hid the girl. Of course, I was immediately intrigued. I saw photographs of her and I thought I wanted to go. And the guy just told me, "This grandmother — there's no way she's ever going to let you meet this girl that's she's raising." I took a translator with me and went to this village, found the grandmother, sat down with her. And to my astonishment, she agreed to let me photograph her granddaughter. And I was paying for this myself, so I asked the translator if it would be OK if I stayed for the week. I had a sleeping bag. The family had a small shed on the side of the house, so I said, "Could I sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings?" And I just told the little girl, whose name was Eun-Sook Lee, that if I ever did anything to embarrass her — she didn't speak a word of English, although she looked very American — she could put up her hand and say, "Stop," and I would stop taking pictures. Then my translator left. I couldn't speak a word of Korean. This is the first night I met Eun-Sook. Her mother was still alive. She was not raising her, her grandmother was raising her. And what struck me immediately was how in love the two of these people were. The grandmother was incredibly fond, deeply in love with this little girl. They slept on the floor at night. The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors, so the heat radiates from underneath the floor. Eun-Sook was 11 years old. I had photographed, as I said, a lot of these kids. Eun-Sook was the fifth child that I found to photograph. And almost universally, amongst all the kids, they were really psychologically damaged by having been made fun of, ridiculed, picked on and been rejected. And Korea was probably the place I found to be the worst for these kids. And what struck me immediately in meeting Eun-Sook was how confident she appeared to be, how happy she seemed to be in her own skin. And remember this picture, because I'm going to show you another picture later. She looks much like her grandmother, although she looks so Western. I decided to follow her to school. This is the first morning I stayed with her. This is on the way to school. This is the morning assembly outside her school. And I noticed that she was clowning around. When the teachers would ask questions, she'd be the first person to raise her hand. Again, not at all shy or withdrawn, or anything like the other children that I'd photographed. The first one to go to the blackboard to answer questions. Getting in trouble for whispering into her best friend's ears. And one of the other things I said to her through the translator — again, this thing about saying stop — was to not pay attention to me. So she really just completely ignored me most of the time. I noticed that at recess, she was the girl who picked the other girls to be on her team. It was very obvious, from the beginning, that she was a leader. This is on the way home. And that's North Korea up along the hill. This is up along the DMZ. They would actually cover the windows every night, so that light couldn't be seen, because the South Korean government has said for years that the North Koreans may invade at any time. So the closer you were to North Korea, the more terrifying it was. Very often at school, I'd be taking pictures, and she would whisper into her girlfriends' ears, and then look at me and say, "Stop." And I would stand at attention, and all the girls would crack up, and it was sort of a little joke. (Laughter) The end of the week came and my translator came back, because I'd asked her to come back, so I could formally thank the grandmother and Eun-Sook. And in the course of the grandmother talking to the translator, the grandmother started crying. And I said to my translator, "What's going on, why is she crying?" And she spoke to the grandmother for a moment, and then she started getting tears in her eyes. And I said, "What did I do? Why is everyone crying?" And the translator said, "The grandmother says that she thinks she's dying, and she wants to know if you would take Eun-Sook to America with you." And I said, "I'm 28 years old and I live in hotels, and I'm not married." I mean, I had fallen in love with this girl, but you know, emotionally I was about 12 years old. If you know of photographers, the joke is it's the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented. "Sorry, I have to go on an assignment, I'll be back" — and then you never come back. So I asked the translator why she thought she was dying. Can I get her to a hospital? Could I pay to get her a doctor? And she refused any help at all. So when I got outside, I gave the translator some money and said, "Go back and see if you can do something." And I gave the grandmother my business card. And I said, "If you're serious, I will try to find a family for her." And I immediately wrote a letter to my best friends in Atlanta, Georgia, who had an 11-year-old son. And my best friend had mistakenly one day said something about wishing he had another child. So my friends Gene and Gayle had not heard from me in about a year, and suddenly I was calling, saying "I'm in Korea and I've met this extraordinary girl." And I said, "The grandmother thinks she's sick, but I think maybe we would have to bring the grandmother over also." And I said, "I'll pay for the ... " I mean, I had this whole sort of picture. So anyway, I left. And my friends actually said they were very interested in adopting her. And I said, "Look, I think I'll scare the grandmother to death, if I tell her that you're willing to adopt her. I want to go back and talk to her." But I was off on assignment. I figured I'd come back in a couple of weeks and talk to the grandmother. And on Christmas Day, I was in Bangkok with a group of photographers and got a telegram — back in those days, you got telegrams — from Time magazine saying someone in Korea had died and left their child in a will to me. Did I know anything about this? Because I hadn't told them what I was doing, because I was so upset with the story they'd run. So, I went back to Korea, and I went back to Eun-Sook's village, and she was gone. And the house that I had spent time in was empty. It was incredibly cold. No one in the village would tell me where Eun-Sook was, because the grandmother had always hidden her from Westerners. And they had no idea about this request that she'd made of me. So I finally found Myung Sung, her best friend that she used to play with after school every day. And Myung Sung, under some pressure from me and the translator, gave us an address on the outside of Seoul. And I went to that address and knocked on the door, and a man answered the door. It was not a very nice area of Seoul, there were mud streets outside of it. And I knocked on the door and Eun-Sook answered the door, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed to be in shock. She didn't recognize me — there was no recognition whatsoever. And this man came to the door and kind of barked something in Korean. And I said to the translator, "What did he say?" And she said, "He wants to know who you are." And I said, "Tell him that I am a photographer." I started explaining who I was, and he interrupted. And she said, "He says he knows who you are, what do you want?" I said, "Well, tell him that I was asked by this little girl's grandmother to find a family for her." And he said, "I'm her uncle, she's fine, you can leave now." So I was — The door was being slammed in my face, it's incredibly cold, and I'm trying to think, "What would the hero do in a movie, if I was writing this as a movie script?" So I said, "It's really cold, I've come a very long way, do you mind if I come in for a minute? I'm freezing." So the guy reluctantly let us in and we sat down on the floor. And as we started talking, I saw him yell something, and Eun-Sook came and brought us some food. And I had this whole mental picture of — sort of like Cinderella. I sort of had this picture of this incredibly wonderful, bright, happy little child, who now appeared to be very withdrawn, being enslaved by this family. And I was really appalled, and I couldn't figure out what to do. And the more I tried talking to him, the less friendly he was getting. So finally I said "Look," — this is all through the translator, because, you know, I don't speak a word of Korean — and I said, "Look, I'm really glad that Eun-Sook has a family to live with. I was very worried about her. I made a promise to her grandmother, your mother, that I would find a family, and I'm so happy that you're going to take care of her. But I bought an airline ticket and I'm stuck here for a week. I'm staying in a hotel downtown. Would you like to come and have lunch tomorrow? And you can practice your English." Because he told me — I was trying to ask him questions about himself. And so I went to the hotel, and I found two older Amerasians. A girl whose mother had been a prostitute, and she was a prostitute, and a boy who'd been in and out of jail. And I said to them, "Look, there's a little girl who has a tiny chance of getting out of here and going to America. I don't know if it's the right decision or not, but I would like you to come to lunch tomorrow and tell the uncle what it's like to walk down the street, what people say to you, what you do for a living. I want him to understand what happens if she stays here. And I could be wrong, I don't know, but I wish you would come tomorrow." So, these two came to lunch and we got thrown out of the restaurant. They were yelling at him, it got to be really ugly. We went outside, and he was just furious. And I knew I had totally blown this thing. Here I was again, trying to figure out what to do. And he started yelling at me, and I said to the translator, "Tell him to calm down, what is he saying?" And she said, "He's saying, 'Who the hell are you to walk into my house, some rich American with your cameras around your neck, accusing me of enslaving my niece? This is my niece, I love her, she's my sister's daughter. Who the hell are you to accuse me of something like this?'" And I said, you know, "Look, you're absolutely right. I don't pretend to understand what's going on here. All I know is, I've been photographing a lot of these children. I'm in love with your niece, I think she's an incredibly special child." And I said, "Look, I will fly my friends over here from the United States if you want to meet them, to see if you approve of them. I just think that — what little I know about the situation, she has very little chance here of having the kind of life that you probably would like her to have." So, everyone told me afterwards that inviting the prospective parents over was, again, the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, because who's ever good enough for your relative? But he invited me to come to a ceremony they were having that day for her grandmother. And they actually take items of clothing and photographs, and they burn them as part of the ritual. And you can see how different she looks just in three months. This was now, I think, early February. And the pictures before were taken in September. Well, there was an American Maryknoll priest that I had met in the course of doing the story, who had 75 children living in his house. He had three women helping him take care of these kids. And so I suggested to the uncle that we go down and meet Father Keane to find out how the adoption process worked. Because I wanted him to feel like this was all being done very much above board. So, this is on the way down to the orphanage. This is Father Keane. He's just a wonderful guy. He had kids from all over Korea living there, and he would find families for these kids. This is a social worker interviewing Eun-Sook. Now, I had always thought she was completely untouched by all of this, because the grandmother, to me, appeared to be sort of the village wise woman — throughout the day, I noticed people kept coming to visit her grandmother. And I always had this mental picture that even though they may have been one of the poorer families in the village, they were one of the most respected. And I always felt that the grandmother had kind of demanded, and insisted, that the villagers treat Eun-Sook with the same respect they treated her. Eun-Sook stayed at Father Keane's, and her uncle agreed to let her stay there until the adoption went through. He actually agreed to the adoption. And I went off on assignment and came back a week later, and Father Keane said, "I've got to talk to you about Eun-Sook." I said, "Oh God, now what?" And he takes me into this room, closes the door and says, "I have 75 children here in the orphanage, and it's total bedlam." There's clothes, there's kids. Three adults and 75 kids — you can imagine. And he said, "The second day she was here she made up a list of all of the names of the older kids and the younger kids. And she assigned one of the older kids to each of the younger kids. And then she set up a work detail list of who cleaned the orphanage on what day." And he said, "She's telling me that I'm messy and I have to clean up my room." And he said, "I don't know who raised her, but she's running the orphanage, and she's been here three days." (Laughter) This was movie day that she organized where all the kids went to the movies. A lot of the kids who had been adopted wrote back to the other kids, telling them what their life was like with their new families. So it was a really big deal when the letters showed up. This is a woman who is now working at the orphanage, whose son had been adopted. Gene and Gayle started studying Korean the moment they had gotten my first letter. They really wanted to be able to welcome Eun-Sook into their family. And one of the things Father Keane told me when I came back from one of these trips — Eun-Sook had chosen the name Natasha, which I understood was from her watching a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon on the American Air Force station. This may be one of those myth-buster things that we'll have to clear up here, in a minute. So, my friend Gene flew over with his son, Tim. Gayle couldn't come. And they spent a lot of time huddled over a dictionary. And this was Gene showing the uncle where Atlanta was on the map, where he lived. This is the uncle signing the adoption papers. Now, we went out to dinner that night to celebrate. The uncle went back to his family and Natasha and Tim and Gene and I went out to dinner. And Gene was showing Natasha how to use a knife and fork, and then Natasha was returning the utensil lessons. We went back to our hotel room, and Gene was showing Natasha also where Atlanta was. This is the third night we were in Korea. The first night we'd gotten a room for the kids right next to us. I'd been staying in this room for about three months — it was a little 15-story Korean hotel. The second night, we didn't keep the kids' room, because we slept on the floor with all the kids at the orphanage. And the third night, we came back — we'd just gone out to dinner, where you saw the pictures — and we got to the front desk, and the guy said, "There's no other free rooms on your floor tonight, you can put the kids five floors below you." And Gene and I looked at each other and said, "We don't want two 11-year-olds five floors away." So his son said, "I have a sleeping bag, I'll sleep on the floor." And I said, "I have one too." So Tim and I slept on the floor, Natasha got one bed, Gene got the other — kids pass out, it's been very exciting for three days. We're lying in bed, and Gene and I are talking about how cool we are. We said, "That was so great, we saved this little girl's life." We were just like, you know, just full of ourselves. And we fall asleep — and I've been in this room for a couple of months now. And they always overheat the hotels in Korea terribly, so during the day I always left the window open. And then about midnight, they turn the heat off in the hotel. So at 1am, the whole room would be like 20 below zero, and I'd get up. I'd been doing this every night I'd been there. So, sure enough, it's one o'clock, room's freezing, I go to close the window and I hear people shouting outside, and I thought, "Oh, the bars must have just gotten out." I don't speak Korean, but I'm hearing these voices, and I'm not hearing anger, I'm hearing terror. So I open the window and I look out, and there's flames coming up the side of our hotel, and the hotel's on fire. So I run over to Gene and I wake him up, and I say, "Don't freak out, I think the hotel's on fire." And now there's smoke and flames coming by our windows — we're on the 11th floor. So the two of us were just like, "Oh my God, oh my God." So we're trying to get Natasha up, and we can't talk to her. You know what kids are like when they've been asleep for like an hour, it's like they took five Valiums — they're all over the place. And we can't talk to her. His son had the L.L.Bean bootlaces, and we're trying to do up his laces. So we try to get to the door, we run to the door, we open the door, and it's like walking into a blast furnace. There's people screaming, the sound of glass breaking, weird thumps. And the whole room filled with smoke in about two seconds. And Gene turns around and says, "We're not going to make it." And he closes the door, and the whole room is now filled with smoke. We're all choking, and there's smoke pouring through the vents, under the doors. There's people screaming. I just remember this unbelievable — just utter chaos. I remember sitting near the bed, and I had two overwhelming feelings. One was absolute terror. "Oh, please God, I just want to wake up. This has got to be a nightmare, this can't be happening. Please, I just want to wake up." And the other is unbelievable guilt. Here I've been playing God with my friends' lives, my friends' son, with Natasha's life, and this what you get when you try playing God, is you hurt people. I remember just being so frightened and terrified. And Gene, who's lying on the floor, says, "We've got to soak towels." I said, "What?" "We've got to soak towels. We're going to die from the smoke." So got towels and put them over our faces and the kids' faces. Then he said, "Do you have gaffer's tape?" "What?" "Do you have gaffer's tape?" I said, "Somewhere in my Halliburton." He says, "We've got to stop the smoke. That's all we can do." I mean, Gene — thank God for Gene. So we put the room service menus over the vents in the wall, we put blankets at the bottom of the door, we put the kids on the windowsill to try to get some air. And there was a new building, going up, that was being built right across the street from our hotel. And there, in the building, were photographers, waiting for people to jump. Eleven people ended up dying in the fire. Five people jumped and died, other people were killed by the smoke. And there's this loud thumping on the door after about 45 minutes in all this, and people were shouting in Korean. And I remember — Natasha didn't want us opening the door — sorry, I was trying not to open the door, because we'd spent so much time barricading the room. I didn't know who it was, I didn't know what they wanted, and Natasha could tell they were firemen trying to get us out. I remember a sort of a tussle at the door, trying to get the door open. In any case, 12 hours later — I mean, they put us in the lobby. Gene ended up using his coat, and his fist in the coat, to break open a liquor cabinet. People were lying on the floor. It was one of just the most horrifying nights. And then 12 hours later, we rented a car, as we had planned to, and drove back to Natasha's village. And we kept saying, "Do you realize we were dying in a hotel fire, like eight hours ago?" It's so weird how life just goes on. Natasha wanted to introduce her brother and father to all the villagers, and the day we showed up turned out to be a 60-year-old man's birthday. This guy's 60 years old. So it turned into a dual celebration, because Natasha was the first person from this village ever to go to the United States. So, these are the greenhouse tents. This is the elders teaching Gene their dances. We drank a lot of rice wine. We were both so drunk, I couldn't believe it. This is the last picture before Gene and Tim headed back. The adoption people told us it was going to take a year for the adoption to go through. Like, what could you do for a year? So I found out the name of every official on both the Korean and American side, and I photographed them, and told them how famous they were going to be when this book was done. And four months later, the adoption papers came through. This is saying goodbye to everybody at the orphanage. This is Father Keane with Natasha at the bus stop. Her great aunt at the airport. I had a wonderful deal with Cathay Pacific airlines for many years, where they gave me free passes on all their airlines in return for photography. It was like the ultimate perk. And the pilot, I actually knew — because they used to let me sit in the jump seat, to tell you how long ago this was. This is a TriStar, and so they let Natasha actually sit in the jump seat. And the pilot, Jeff Cowley, actually went back and adopted one of the other kids at the orphanage after meeting Natasha. This is 28 hours later in Atlanta. It's a very long flight. Just to make things even crazier, Gayle, Natasha's new mom, was three days away from giving birth to her own daughter. You know, if you were writing this, you'd say, "No, we've got to write the script differently." This is the first night showing Natasha her new cousins and uncles and aunts. Gene and Gayle know everyone in Atlanta — they're the most social couple imaginable. So, at this point, Natasha doesn't speak a word of English, other than what little Father Keane taught her. This is Kylie, her sister, who's now a doctor, on the right. This is a deal I had with Natasha, which is that when we got to Atlanta she could cut off my beard. She never liked it very much. She learned English in three months. She entered seventh grade at her own age level. Pledge of Allegiance for the first time. This is her cooking teacher. Natasha told me a lot of the kids thought she was stuck up, because they would talk to her and she wouldn't answer, and they didn't realize she didn't speak English very well. But what I noticed, again as an observer, was she was choosing who was going to be on her team, and seemed to be very popular very, very quickly. Now, remember the picture, how much she looked like her grandmother, at the beginning? People were always telling Natasha how much she looks like her mother, Gayle. (Laughter) This is a tense moment in the first football game, I think. And Kylie — I mean, it was almost like Kylie was her own child. She's being baptized. Now, a lot of parents, when they adopt, actually want to erase their children's history. And Gayle and Gene did the complete opposite. They were studying Korean; they bought Korean clothes. Gene even did a little tile work in the kitchen, which was that, "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl that came from the hills of Korea to live happily ever after in Atlanta." She hates this picture — it was her first job. She bought a bright red Karmann Ghia with the money she made working at Burger King. The captain of the cheerleaders. Beauty pageant. Used to do their Christmas card every year. Gene's been restoring this car for a million years. Kodak hired Natasha to be a translator for them at the Olympics in Korea. Her future husband, Jeff, was working for Canon cameras, and met Natasha at the Olympic Village. This is her first trip back to Korea. So there's her uncle. This is her half sister. She went back to the village. That's her best friend's mother. And I always thought that was a very Annie Hall kind of outfit. (Laughter) It's just, you know, it was just so interesting, just to watch — this is her mother in the background there. This is Natasha's wedding day. Gene is looking a little older. This is Sydney, who's going to be three years old in a couple of days. And there's Evan. And Natasha, would you just come up, for a second, just maybe to say hello to everybody? (Applause) Natasha's actually never heard me tell the story. You know, we've looked at the pictures together. Natasha: I've seen pictures millions of times, but today was the first time I'm actually seeing him give the whole presentation. I started crying. Rick Smolan: There's about 40 things she's going to tell me, "That wasn't what happened." Natasha: I'll tell you that later. RS: Anyway, thank you, Mike and Richard, so much for letting us tell the story. Thank you, all of you. (Applause)

"Peace on Earth"

Raul Midon

{0: 'Raul Midon'}

{0: ['guitarist']}

{0: 'Guitarist and singer Raul Midon blends flamenco, jazz and R&B to create a category-defying sound. His life story is as inspiring as his musical vision.'}

2007-03-03

2008-07-03

TED2007

en

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

['entertainment', 'guitar', 'music', 'peace', 'singer', 'storytelling', 'performance', 'live music']

{188: '"Tembererana"', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 265: '"Kounandi"', 23927: 'Free falling in outer space', 1013: 'Women, wartime and the dream of peace', 1209: 'One day of peace'}

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

Guitarist and singer Raul Midon plays "Everybody" and "Peace on Earth" during his 2007 set at TED.

♫ Picture yourself in a world where there's no one else, ♫ ♫ nobody anywhere. ♫ ♫ A moment ago, there were voices and faces to look upon, ♫ ♫ you can't see them anywhere. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and no one left to say it to, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen to what I say. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth. ♫ ♫ Children are everywhere. ♫ ♫ Now there is a reason for everyone's time on Earth. ♫ ♫ Wondering why you should care, yeah. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and only love can see us through, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen what I say, yeah. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big celebrity ♫ ♫ to feel the power, the power in your soul, no. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big star on MTV ♫ ♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ I can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ She can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ He can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can, I can, she can, he can, ♫ ♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little ♫ ♫ little difference, yeah. ♫ ♫ Talking 'bout everybody gonna make a little difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world, ♫ ♫ oh yeah. ♫ (Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) This is a song that came about because I think it's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what's going on, and the wars and so forth. This song kind of came out of all of that. And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record, which I still stand by, but this has got something else in it. It's called "Peace on Earth." ♫ There is no hope. ♫ ♫ There is no future. ♫ ♫ No faith in God to save the day. ♫ ♫ There is no reason, no understanding ♫ ♫ no sacred place to hide away. ♫ ♫ There is no earnest conversation. ♫ ♫ No words of wisdom from the wise. ♫ ♫ There is no reconciliation ♫ ♫ and no collective compromise. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ There is no darkness, no sunshine. ♫ ♫ There is no great society. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom without conviction. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom to be free. ♫ ♫ There is no heaven, no fire and brimstone. ♫ ♫ There is no brotherhood of man. ♫ ♫ There is no country, no one religion. ♫ ♫ There is no universal plan. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ The answer is ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction, ♫ ♫ a balance of power, ♫ ♫ a weapon for everyone. ♫ ♫ Mutual-assured destruction ♫ ♫ bringing peace to everyone. ♫ (Trumpet sounds) (Trumpet sounds) ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ There in the hallway, ♫ ♫ peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ (Applause)

A hero of the Congo forest

Corneille Ewango

{0: 'Corneille Ewango'}

{0: ['botanist and activist']}

{0: 'As a botanist at the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Congo basin, Corneille Ewango has faced down poachers and soldiers who threaten this delicate and vital ecosystem.'}

2007-06-06

2008-07-07

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'activism', 'animals', 'biodiversity', 'trees', 'war', 'ecology']

{209: 'Rebuilding a neighborhood with beauty, dignity, hope', 53: 'Greening the ghetto', 153: 'How I built a windmill', 1874: 'Ecology from the air', 2075: "An engineer's vision for tiny forests, everywhere", 2546: 'How to grow a forest in your backyard'}

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

Botanist Corneille Ewango talks about his work at the Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Congo Basin -- and his heroic work protecting it from poachers, miners and raging civil wars.

I don't speak English. I start speaking English, learning English, about a year ago. I speak French and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais. I'm born in the Western Congo, in an area around here, and then went to university in Kisangani. And after I finished, I went to this area, the Ituri Forest. But what I've been doing — when I was about 14, I grew in my uncle's house. And my father was a soldier, and my uncle was a fisherman and also a poacher. What I've been doing from 14 to 17 was, I was assisting them collecting ivory tusk, meat and whatever they were killing, poaching, hunting in the forest, bring it in the main city to get access to the market. But finally, I got myself involved. Around 17 to 20 years, I became, myself, a poacher. And I wanted to do it, because — I believed — to continue my studies. I wanted to go to university, but my father was poor, my uncle even. So, I did it. And for three to four years, I went to university. For three times, I applied to biomedical science, to be a doctor. I didn't succeed. I was having my inscriptions, my admission to biology. And I said, "No way, I'm not doing it. My family's poor, my area don't have better health care. I want to be a doctor to serve them." Three times, that means three years, and I start getting old. I say, "Oh, no, I continue." So, I did tropical ecology and plant botany. When I finished, I went to the Ituri Forest for my internship. It's where I really getting passion with what I'm doing right up to now — I'm standing in front of you — doing botany and wildlife conservation. That time the Ituri Forest was created as a forest reserve with some animals and also plants. And the training center there was built around the scientific Congolese staff and some American scientists also. So, the Okapi Faunal Reserve protects number — I think that is the largest number of elephants we have right now in protected areas in Congo. It has also chimpanzees. And it has been named Okapi Faunal Reserve because of this beautiful creature. That is a forest giraffe. I think you guys know it quite well. Here we have savanna giraffes, but through evolution we have this forest giraffe that lives only in Congo. It has also some beautiful primates. Thirteen species — highest diversity we can find in one single area in Africa. And it has the Ituri Forest itself — about 1,300 species of plants, so far known. I joined the Wildlife Conservation Society, working there, in 1995, but I started working with them as a student in 1991. I was appointed as a teaching assistant at my university because I accomplished with honor. But I didn't like the way — the instruction I got was very poor. And I wanted to be formed to a training center and a research center. With the end of the dictatorship regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, that most of you know, life became very, very difficult. And the work we have been doing was completely difficult to do and to achieve it. When Kabila started his movement to liberate Congo, so Mobutu soldiers started moving and retreated. So they started fleeing from the east to the west. And the Okapi Faunal Reserve is there, so there was a road from Goma, somewhere here, and coming like this. So they might go through, pass through the Okapi Faunal Reserve. Congo has five of the world's richest sites of protected area, and the Okapi Faunal Reserve is one of them. So soldier was fleeing in the Okapi Faunal Reserve. On their way, they looted everything. Torture, wars — oh, my God, you can't believe. Every person was looking his way — where to go, we don't know. And it was for us, the young, the first time really we hear the language of war, of guns. And even people who faced the rebellion of 1963, after our independence, they didn't believe what was happening. They were killing people. They were doing whatever they want because they have power. Who have been doing that? Young children. Child soldiers. You can't ask him how old he is because he has guns. But I was from the west, working in the east. I even [at] that time was not speaking Swahili. And when they came, they looted everything. You can't speak Lingala because Lingala was from Mobutu, and everyone speaking Lingala is soldier. And I was from the same area to him. All my friends said, we are leaving because we are a target. But I'm not going to the east, because I don't know Swahili. I stay. If I go, I will be killed. I can't go back to my area — it's more than 1,000 kilometers [away]. I stayed after they looted everything. We have been doing research on botany, and we have a small herbarium of 4,500 sheets of plants. We cut, we dry and we packed them, we mounted them on a folder. Purpose: so that we start them for agriculture, for medicine, for whatever, and for science, for the study of the flora and the change of the forest. That is people moving around, that's even Pygmies. And this is a bright guy, hard-working person, and Pygmy. I've been working with him about 10 years. And with soldiers, they went to the forest for poaching elephants. Because he's Pygmy, he knows how to track elephants in the forest. He has been attacked by a leopard and they abandon him in the forest. They came to told me, I have to save him. And what I did, I gave him just antibiotics that we care for tuberculosis. And fortunately, I saved his life. And that was the language of the war. Everywhere there has been constant extraction of mineral, killing animals, the logging timbers and so on. And what of important things — I think all of you here have a cell phone. That mineral has killed a lot: five millions of Congolese have gone because of this Colombo-Tantalite — they call it Coltan — that they use it to make cell phones and it has been in that area, all over in Congo. Extraction, and good, big business of the war. And what I did for the first war, after we have lost everything, I have to save something, even myself, my life and life of the staff. I buried some of our new vehicle engines, I buried it to save it. And some of equipment went with them, on the top of the canopy, to save it. He's not collecting plants, he's going to save our equipment on the canopy. And with the material that's left — because they wanted to destroy it, to burn it, they didn't understand it, they didn't go to school — I packed it. And that is me, going to, hurrying to Uganda, to try to save that 4,000 material, with people carrying them on the bikes, bicycles. And after that, we succeeded. I housed that 4,000 material at the herbarium of Makerere University. And after the war, I have been able to bring it back home, so that we continue our studies. The second war came while we didn't expect it. With friends, we had been sitting and watching match football, and having some good music with WorldSpace radio, when it started, I think. So, it was so bad. We heard that now from the east again the war started, and it's going fast. This time I think Kabila will go in place of, as he did with Mobutu. And the reserve was a target to the rebels. Three different movements and two militia acting in the same area and competing for natural resources. And there was no way to work. They destroy everything. Poaching — oh, no way. And that's the powerful men. We have to meet and to talk to them. What's the regulation of the reserve and what is the regulation of the parks? And they can't do what they are doing. So we went to meet them. That is Coltan extraction, gold mining. So, we started talking with them, convincing them that we are in a protected area. There are regulations that it's prohibited to do logging, mining and poaching, specifically. But they said, "You guys, you think that soldiers who are dying are not important, and your animals you are protecting are most important. We don't think so. We have to do it, because to let our movement advance." I say, "No way, you are not going to do it here." We started talking with them and I was negotiating. Tried to protect our equipment, tried to protect our staff and the villages of about 1,500 people. And we continued. But I was doing that, negotiating with them. Sometimes we are having meeting and they are talking with Jean-Pierre Bemba, with Mbusa Nyamwisi, with Kabila, and I'm there. Sometimes, they talk to my own language, that is, Lingala. I hear it and what strategy they are doing, what they are planning. Sometimes, they are having a helicopter to supply them with ammunition and so on. They used me to carry that, and I was doing counting, what comes from where, and where, and where. I had only this equipment — my satellite phone, my computer and a plastic solar panel — that I hide it in the forest. And every time, daily, after we have meeting, what compromise we have, whatever, I go, I write a short email, send it. I don't know how many people I had on my address. I sent the message: what is going about the progress of the war and what they are planning to do. They started suspecting that what we do on the morning, and the afternoon, it's on the news, BBC, RFI. (Laughter) Something might be going on. And one day, we went for a meeting. (Applause) Sorry. One day, we went to meet the Chief Commander. He had the same iridium cell phone like me. And he asked me, "Do you know how to use this?" I said, "I have never seen it. (Laughter) I don't know." And I had mine on my pocket. So, it was a chance that they trusted me a lot. They didn't — they was not looking on me. So I was scared. And when we finished the meeting, I went to return it in the forest. And I was sending news, doing whatever, reporting daily to the U.N., to UNESCO, to our institution in New York, what have been going. And for that, they have been having big pressure to leave, to free the area. Because there was no way — whatever they do, it's known the same time. During the first two rebellions, they killed all animals in the zoo. We have a zoo of 14 Okapis, and one of them was pregnant. And during the war, after a week of heavy war, fighting in the area, we succeeded: we had the first Okapi. This is the only trouser and shirt remind me of this. This is not local population, this is rebels. They are now happy sending the news that they have protected the Okapi with the war, because we sent the news that they are killing and poaching everywhere. After a week, we celebrated the birthday of that Okapi, they killed an elephant, just 50 meters to the area where the zoo, where Okapi was born. And I was mad. I oppose it — that they are now going to dissect it, until I do my report and then I see the Chief Commander. And I succeeded. The elephant just decayed and they just got the tusks. What we are doing after that — that was the situation of the war — we have to rebuild. I had some money. I was paid 150 dollars. I devoted half of it to rebuild the herbarium, because we didn't have good infrastructure to start plants. Wildlife Conservation Society more dealing with plants. I started this with 70 dollars, and start fundraising money to where I've been going. I had opportunity to go all over, where herbarium for my African material is. And they supported me a bit, and I built this. Now, it's doing work to train young Congolese. And also, what one of the speciality we are doing, my design is tracking the global warming effect on biodiversity, and what the impacts of the Ituri Forest is playing to uptake carbon. This is one of the studies we are doing on a 40-hectare plot, where we have tagged trees and lianas from one centimeters, and we are tracking them. We have now data of about 15 years, to see how that forest is contributing to the carbon reductions. And that is — I think it's difficult for me. This is a very embarrassing talk, I know. I don't know where to start, where to finish it. When I was thinking to come here, what best title I wanted to say to my talk, I didn't find this. But now I think that I would have titled it, "The Language of Guns." Where are you people? Now we are talking about reconstitution, rebuild Africa. But is gun industries a tool to rebuild, or is it a game? I think we see the war like a game — like soccer, football. Everybody is happy, but see what it's doing, see what is going in Darfur. Now we say, oh, my God. See what the wars in Rwanda. That's because of the language of guns. I don't think that someone may blame Google, because it's doing the right things, even if people like Al-Qaeda are using Google to connect between them. But it's serving millions for the best. But what is doing with gun industries? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, thank you. Just wait over there. It's an amazing story. I suspect a lot of people here have the same question I have. How can we help you? Corneille Ewango: That's really embarrassing questions. I think that now I feel nervous. And I think, helping us, people are acting sometimes by ignorance. I did it myself. If I know when I was young, that [by] killing an elephant, I'm destroying biodiversity, I would not have done it. Many, many of you have seen the talents of Africans, but there are few who are going to school. Many are dying because of all those kind of pandemics, HIV, malaria, poverty, not going to school. What you can assist us, it's by building capacities. How many have got opportunity like me to go to U.S., do a master's? And go — now, I'm in the Netherlands to do a Ph.D. But many of them are just here, because they don't have money. And they can't go even to university. They can't even attain the bachelor's degree. Building capacities for the young generation is going to make a better generation and a better future tomorrow for Africa. CA: Thank you, thank you. (Applause)

Animate characters by evolving them

Torsten Reil

{0: 'Torsten Reil'}

{0: ['animating neurobiologist']}

{0: 'By coding computer simulations with biologically modeled nervous systems, Torsten Reil and his company NaturalMotion breathe life into the animated characters inhabiting the most eye-poppingly realistic games and movies around.'}

2003-03-03

2008-07-08

TED2003

en

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

['animals', 'biomechanics', 'demo', 'design', 'entertainment', 'gaming', 'technology', 'virtual reality', 'animation']

{280: 'Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity', 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 18: "Biomimicry's surprising lessons from nature's engineers", 469: 'How Benjamin Button got his face', 996: '7 ways games reward the brain', 361: 'Are games better than life?'}

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

Torsten Reil talks about how the study of biology can help make natural-looking animated people -- by building a human from the inside out, with bones, muscles and a nervous system. He spoke at TED in 2003; see his work now in GTA4.

I'm going to talk about a technology that we're developing at Oxford now, that we think is going to change the way that computer games and Hollywood movies are being made. That technology is simulating humans. It's simulated humans with a simulated body and a simulated nervous system to control that body. Now, before I talk more about that technology, let's have a quick look at what human characters look like at the moment in computer games. This is a clip from a game called "Grand Theft Auto 3." We already saw that briefly yesterday. And what you can see is — it is actually a very good game. It's one of the most successful games of all time. But what you'll see is that all the animations in this game are very repetitive. They pretty much look the same. I've made him run into a wall here, over and over again. And you can see he looks always the same. The reason for that is that these characters are actually not real characters. They are a graphical visualization of a character. To produce these animations, an animator at a studio has to anticipate what's going to happen in the actual game, and then has to animate that particular sequence. So, he or she sits down, animates it, and tries to anticipate what's going to happen, and then these particular animations are just played back at appropriate times in the computer game. Now, the result of that is that you can't have real interactivity. All you have is animations that are played back at more or less the appropriate times. It also means that games aren't really going to be as surprising as they could be, because you only get out of it, at least in terms of the character, what you actually put into it. There's no real emergence there. And thirdly, as I said, most of the animations are very repetitive because of that. Now, the only way to get around that is to actually simulate the human body and to simulate that bit of the nervous system of the brain that controls that body. And maybe, if I could have you for a quick demonstration to show what the difference is — because, I mean, it's very, very trivial. If I push Chris a bit, like this, for example, he'll react to it. If I push him from a different angle, he'll react to it differently, and that's because he has a physical body, and because he has the motor skills to control that body. It's a very trivial thing. It's not something you get in computer games at the moment, at all. Thank you very much. Chris Anderson: That's it? Torsten Reil: That's it, yes. So, that's what we're trying to simulate — not Chris specifically, I should say, but humans in general. Now, we started working on this a while ago at Oxford University, and we tried to start very simply. What we tried to do was teach a stick figure how to walk. That stick figure is physically stimulated. You can see it here on the screen. So, it's subject to gravity, has joints, etc. If you just run the simulation, it will just collapse, like this. The tricky bit is now to put an AI controller in it that actually makes it work. And for that, we use the neural network, which we based on that part of the nervous system that we have in our spine that controls walking in humans. It's called the central pattern generator. So, we simulated that as well, and then the really tricky bit is to teach that network how to walk. For that we used artificial evolution — genetic algorithms. We heard about those already yesterday, and I suppose that most of you are familiar with that already. But, just briefly, the concept is that you create a large number of different individuals — neural networks, in this case — all of which are random at the beginning. You hook these up — in this case, to the virtual muscles of that two-legged creature here — and hope that it does something interesting. At the beginning, they're all going to be very boring. Most of them won't move at all, but some of them might make a tiny step. Those are then selected by the algorithm, reproduced with mutation and recombinations to introduce sex as well. And you repeat that process over and over again, until you have something that walks — in this case, in a straight line, like this. So that was the idea behind this. When we started this, I set up the simulation one evening. It took about three to four hours to run the simulation. I got up the next morning, went to the computer and looked at the results, and was hoping for something that walked in a straight line, like I've just demonstrated, and this is what I got instead. (Laughter) So, it was back to the drawing board for us. We did get it to work eventually, after tweaking a bit here and there. And this is an example of a successful evolutionary run. So, what you'll see in a moment is a very simple biped that's learning how to walk using artificial evolution. At the beginning, it can't walk at all, but it will get better and better over time. So, this is the one that can't walk at all. (Laughter) Now, after five generations of applying evolutionary process, the genetic algorithm is getting a tiny bit better. (Laughter) Generation 10 and it'll take a few steps more — still not quite there. But now, after generation 20, it actually walks in a straight line without falling over. That was the real breakthrough for us. It was, academically, quite a challenging project, and once we had reached that stage, we were quite confident that we could try and do other things as well with this approach — actually simulating the body and simulating that part of the nervous system that controls it. Now, at this stage, it also became clear that this could be very exciting for things like computer games or online worlds. What you see here is the character standing there, and there's an obstacle that we put in its way. And what you see is, it's going to fall over the obstacle. Now, the interesting bit is, if I move the obstacle a tiny bit to the right, which is what I'm doing now, here, it will fall over it in a completely different way. And again, if you move the obstacle a tiny bit, it'll again fall differently. (Laughter) Now, what you see, by the way, at the top there, are some of the neural activations being fed into the virtual muscles. Okay. That's the video. Thanks. Now, this might look kind of trivial, but it's actually very important because this is not something you get at the moment in any interactive or any virtual worlds. Now, at this stage, we decided to start a company and move this further, because obviously this was just a very simple, blocky biped. What we really wanted was a full human body. So we started the company. We hired a team of physicists, software engineers and biologists to work on this, and the first thing we had to work on was to create the human body, basically. It's got to be relatively fast, so you can run it on a normal machine, but it's got to be accurate enough, so it looks good enough, basically. So we put quite a bit of biomechanical knowledge into this thing, and tried to make it as realistic as possible. What you see here on the screen right now is a very simple visualization of that body. I should add that it's very simple to add things like hair, clothes, etc., but what we've done here is use a very simple visualization, so you can concentrate on the movement. Now, what I'm going to do right now, in a moment, is just push this character a tiny bit and we'll see what happens. Nothing really interesting, basically. It falls over, but it falls over like a rag doll, basically. The reason for that is that there's no intelligence in it. It becomes interesting when you put artificial intelligence into it. So, this character now has motor skills in the upper body — nothing in the legs yet, in this particular one. But what it will do — I'm going to push it again. It will realize autonomously that it's being pushed. It's going to stick out its hands. It's going to turn around into the fall, and try and catch the fall. So that's what you see here. Now, it gets really interesting if you then add the AI for the lower part of the body as well. So here, we've got the same character. I'm going to push it a bit harder now, harder than I just pushed Chris. But what you'll see is — it's going to receive a push now from the left. What you see is it takes steps backwards, it tries to counter-balance, it tries to look at the place where it thinks it's going to land. I'll show you this again. And then, finally hits the floor. Now, this becomes really exciting when you push that character in different directions, again, just as I've done. That's something that you cannot do right now. At the moment, you only have empty computer graphics in games. What this is now is a real simulation. That's what I want to show you now. So, here's the same character with the same behavior I've just shown you, but now I'm just going to push it from different directions. First, starting with a push from the right. This is all slow motion, by the way, so we can see what's going on. Now, the angle will have changed a tiny bit, so you can see that the reaction is different. Again, a push, now this time from the front. And you see it falls differently. And now from the left — and it falls differently. That was really exciting for us to see that. That was the first time we've seen that. This is the first time the public sees this as well, because we have been in stealth mode. I haven't shown this to anybody yet. Now, just a fun thing: what happens if you put that character — this is now a wooden version of it, but it's got the same AI in it — but if you put that character on a slippery surface, like ice. We just did that for a laugh, just to see what happens. (Laughter) And this is what happens. (Laughter) (Applause) It's nothing we had to do about this. We just took this character that I just talked about, put it on a slippery surface, and this is what you get out of it. And that's a really fascinating thing about this approach. Now, when we went to film studios and games developers and showed them that technology, we got a very good response. And what they said was, the first thing they need immediately is virtual stuntmen. Because stunts are obviously very dangerous, they're very expensive, and there are a lot of stunt scenes that you cannot do, obviously, because you can't really allow the stuntman to be seriously hurt. So, they wanted to have a digital version of a stuntman and that's what we've been working on for the past few months. And that's our first product that we're going to release in a couple of weeks. So, here are just a few very simple scenes of the guy just being kicked. That's what people want. That's what we're giving them. (Laughter) You can see, it's always reacting. This is not a dead body. This is a body who basically, in this particular case, feels the force and tries to protect its head. Only, I think it's quite a big blow again. You feel kind of sorry for that thing, and we've seen it so many times now that we don't really care any more. (Laughter) There are much worse videos than this, by the way, which I have taken out, but ... Now, here's another one. What people wanted as a behavior was to have an explosion, a strong force applied to the character, and have the character react to it in midair. So that you don't have a character that looks limp, but actually a character that you can use in an action film straight away, that looks kind of alive in midair as well. So this character is going to be hit by a force, it's going to realize it's in the air, and it's going to try and, well, stick out its arm in the direction where it's landing. That's one angle; here's another angle. We now think that the realism we're achieving with this is good enough to be used in films. And let's just have a look at a slightly different visualization. This is something I just got last night from an animation studio in London, who are using our software and experimenting with it right now. So this is exactly the same behavior that you saw, but in a slightly better rendered version. So if you look at the character carefully, you see there are lots of body movements going on, none of which you have to animate like in the old days. Animators had to actually animate them. This is all happening automatically in the simulation. This is a slightly different angle, and again a slow motion version of this. This is incredibly quick. This is happening in real time. You can run this simulation in real time, in front of your eyes, change it, if you want to, and you get the animation straight out of it. At the moment, doing something like this by hand would take you probably a couple of days. This is another behavior they requested. I'm not quite sure why, but we've done it anyway. It's a very simple behavior that shows you the power of this approach. In this case, the character's hands are fixed to a particular point in space, and all we've told the character to do is to struggle. And it looks organic. It looks realistic. You feel kind of sorry for the guy. It's even worse — and that is another video I just got last night — if you render that a bit more realistically. Now, I'm showing this to you just to show you how organic it actually can feel, how realistic it can look. And this is all a physical simulation of the body, using AI to drive virtual muscles in that body. Now, one thing which we did for a laugh was to create a slightly more complex stunt scene, and one of the most famous stunts is the one where James Bond jumps off a dam in Switzerland and then is caught by a bungee. Got a very short clip here. Yes, you can just about see it here. In this case, they were using a real stunt man. It was a very dangerous stunt. It was just voted, I think in the Sunday Times, as one of the most impressive stunts. Now, we've just tried and — looked at our character and asked ourselves, "Can we do that ourselves as well?" Can we use the physical simulation of the character, use artificial intelligence, put that artificial intelligence into the character, drive virtual muscles, simulate the way he jumps off the dam, and then skydive afterwards, and have him caught by a bungee afterwards? We did that. It took about altogether just two hours, pretty much, to create the simulation. And that's what it looks like, here. Now, this could do with a bit more work. It's still very early stages, and we pretty much just did this for a laugh, just to see what we'd get out of it. But what we found over the past few months is that this approach — that we're pretty much standard upon — is incredibly powerful. We are ourselves surprised what you actually get out of the simulations. There's very often very surprising behavior that you didn't predict before. There's so many things we can do with this right now. The first thing, as I said, is going to be virtual stuntmen. Several studios are using this software now to produce virtual stuntmen, and they're going to hit the screen quite soon, actually, for some major productions. The second thing is video games. With this technology, video games will look different and they will feel very different. For the first time, you'll have actors that really feel very interactive, that have real bodies that really react. I think that's going to be incredibly exciting. Probably starting with sports games, which are going to become much more interactive. But I particularly am really excited about using this technology in online worlds, like there, for example, that Tom Melcher has shown us. The degree of interactivity you're going to get is totally different, I think, from what you're getting right now. A third thing we are looking at and very interested in is simulation. We've been approached by several simulation companies, but one project we're particularly excited about, which we're starting next month, is to use our technology — and in particular, the walking technology — to help aid surgeons who work on children with cerebral palsy, to predict the outcome of operations on these children. As you probably know, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome of an operation is if you try and correct the gait. The classic quote is, I think, it's unpredictable at best, is what people think right now, is the outcome. Now, what we want to do with our software is allow our surgeons to have a tool. We're going to simulate the gait of a particular child and the surgeon can then work on that simulation and try out different ways to improve that gait, before he actually commits to an actual surgery. That's one project we're particularly excited about, and that's going to start next month. Just finally, this is only just the beginning. We can only do several behaviors right now. The AI isn't good enough to simulate a full human body. The body yes, but not all the motor skills that we have. And, I think, we're only there if we can have something like ballet dancing. Right now, we don't have that but I'm very sure that we will be able to do that at some stage. We do have one unintentional dancer actually, the last thing I'm going to show you. This was an AI contour that was produced and evolved — half-evolved, I should say — to produce balance, basically. So, you kick the guy and the guy's supposed to counter-balance. That's what we thought was going to come out of this. But this is what emerged out of it, in the end. (Music) Bizarrely, this thing doesn't have a head. I'm not quite sure why. So, this was not something we actually put in there. He just started to create that dance himself. He's actually a better dancer than I am, I have to say. And what you see after a while — I think he even goes into a climax right at the end. And I think — there you go. (Laughter) So, that all happened automatically. We didn't put that in there. That's just the simulation creating this itself, basically. So it's just — (Applause) Thanks. Not quite John Travolta yet, but we're working on that as well, so thanks very much for your time. Thanks. (Applause) CA: Incredible. That was really incredible. TR: Thanks.

What happens when you lose everything

David Hoffman

{0: 'David Hoffman'}

{0: ['filmmaker']}

{0: "In David Hoffman's long film career, he's made documentaries on everything from Amelia Earhardt to B.B. King, from double-dutch jump-roping to F-15 fighter pilots. Lately he's been fascinated with the early space program and our mania for all things Sputnik."}

2008-02-02

2008-07-09

TED2008

en

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

['culture', 'film', 'library', 'personal growth', 'storytelling', 'movies']

{73: 'In praise of slowness', 201: 'The lost art of letter-writing', 349: 'Remember to say thank you', 403: "A tour of Nollywood, Nigeria's booming film industry", 1476: 'The shared wonder of film', 170: 'My journey into movies that matter'}

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

Nine days before TED2008, filmmaker David Hoffman lost almost everything he owned in a fire that destroyed his home, office and 30 years of passionate collecting. He looks back at a life that's been wiped clean in an instant -- and looks forward.

I had a fire nine days ago. My archive: 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my books, my dad's books, my photographs. I'd collected — I was a collector, major, big-time. It's gone. I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. I mean, this was — was I my things? I always live in the present — I love the present. I cherish the future. And I was taught some strange thing as a kid, like, you've got to make something good out of something bad. You've got to make something good out of something bad. This was bad! Man, I was — I cough. I was sick. That's my camera lens. The first one — the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. That's my feature film. "King, Murray" won Cannes Film Festival 1970 — the only print I had. That's my papers. That was in minutes — 20 minutes. Epiphany hit me. Something hit me. "You've got to make something good out of something bad," I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. By the way, that's "Sputnik." I ran it last year. "Sputnik" was downtown, the negative. It wasn't touched. These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks downtown. I called my sister. I called my neighbors. I said, "Come dig." That's me at my desk. That was a desk took 40-some years to build. You know — all the stuff. That's my daughter, Jean. She came. She's a nurse in San Francisco. "Dig it up," I said. "Pieces. I want pieces. Bits and pieces." I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on — my next project. That's my sister. She took care of pictures, because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot. And those are some of the pictures that — something was good about the burnt pictures. I didn't know. I looked at that — I said, "Wow, is that better than the —" That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for television. It's the only copy I had. Pieces of it. Idea about women. So I started to say, "Hey, man, you are too much! You could cry about this." I really didn't. I just instead said, "I'm going to make something out of it, and maybe next year ... " And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who've already given me so much solace, and just say to TEDsters: I'm proud of me. That I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm going to make something good out of this, all these pieces. That's Arthur Leipzig's original photograph I loved. I was a big record collector — the records didn't make it. Boy, I tell you, film burns. Film burns. I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film. The negatives are gone. That's my father's letter to me, telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. That's my daughter and me. She's still there. She's there this morning, actually. That's my house. My family's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley. That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I did. My children, Davey and Henry. My son, Davey, in the hotel two nights ago. So, my message to you folks, from my three minutes, is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you. I will be back. I love being at TED. I came to live it, and I am living it. That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz, in Bonny Doon, just 35 miles from here. Thank you everybody. (Applause)

Institutions vs. collaboration

Clay Shirky

{0: 'Clay Shirky'}

{0: ['social media theorist']}

{0: 'Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.'}

2005-07-01

2008-07-10

TEDGlobal 2005

en

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

['business', 'cognitive science', 'collaboration', 'culture', 'social change', 'society', 'technology']

{63: 'The era of open innovation', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 247: 'The new open-source economics', 1532: '(Re)touching lives through photos', 1451: 'One year of turning the world inside out', 1085: 'My wish: Use art to turn the world inside out'}

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

In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.

How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group. More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor — and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination — there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. So, that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes. So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr. Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "Mermaid Parade." There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow. Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's — in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route. First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph. When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems. Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, "I'll call you when I get there." "Call me when you get off work." Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do. So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged "Iraq." And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important — because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters. What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each. This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like — this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail. And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken — just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all. This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources — this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires — great, that's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount. So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "Iraq." And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "Bad Day at Work." Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee? And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle. Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages — (Laughter) — of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase. Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining. The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, "Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing." Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter) The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing, of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers — classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it, using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys — pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy. I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources — she's a reporter for the New York Times — her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws — pretty much a patchwork of state laws — that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it — we want a professional class of truth-tellers — it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background — the institution to which they were attached — is becoming incoherent. Here's another example. Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call "thinspiration." They have little slogans, like "Salvation through Starvation." They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass. We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals. So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week. Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state. Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives — like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive — the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific. And so the point here is not, "This is wonderful," or "We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework." It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

"Mother of Pearl," "If I Had You"

Nellie McKay

{0: 'Nellie McKay'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter']}

{0: 'Nellie McKay sings, croons, raps, grooves and -- barks? -- to glowing critical acclaim.'}

2008-02-02

2008-07-11

TED2008

en

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

['entertainment', 'humor', 'love', 'music', 'piano', 'women', 'live music', 'performance']

{287: '"Clonie"', 325: '"The Dog Song"', 117: 'Cape Breton fiddling in reel time', 188: '"Tembererana"', 1325: 'The debut of the British Paraorchestra', 1162: 'We need a "moral operating system"'}

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

The wonderful Nellie McKay sings "Mother of Pearl" (with the immortal first line "Feminists don't have a sense of humor") and "If I Had You" from her sparkling set at TED2008.

♫ Feminists don't have a sense of humor. ♫ ♫ Feminists just want to be alone — boo hoo, hoo, hoo. ♫ ♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫ ♫ They have a tumor on their funny bone. ♫ ♫ They say child molestation isn't funny — ha, ha, ha, ha. ♫ ♫ Rape and degradation's just a crime — lighten up, ladies. ♫ ♫ Rampant prostitution's sex for money — what’s wrong with that? ♫ ♫ Can't these chicks do anything but whine? ♫ ♫ Dance break! Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ ♫ Woo-hoo! ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da — ♫ ♫ yeah, take it off. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, dum. ♫ ♫ They say cheap objectification isn’t witty — it’s hot! ♫ ♫ Equal work and wages worth the fight — ♫ ♫ sing us a new one. ♫ ♫ On-demand abortion every city — OK, but no gun control. ♫ ♫ Won’t these women ever get a life? ♫ ♫ Feminists don’t have a sense of humor — poor Hillary. ♫ ♫ Feminists and vegetarians — make mine a Big Mac. ♫ ♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫ ♫ They're far too sensitive to ever be a ham, ♫ ♫ that's why these feminists just need to find a man. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ I’m Dennis Kucinich and I approved this message. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. I asked my mother, you know, should I say anything in support of anyone? And she said, "Oh no! Just dis everybody, except Ralph Nader." (Laughter) ♫ I could show the world how to smile, ♫ ♫ I could be glad all of the while. ♫ ♫ I could turn the gray skies to blue, if I had you. ♫ ♫ I could leave the old days behind, ♫ ♫ leave all my pals, I’d never mind. ♫ ♫ I could start my life all anew, if I had you. ♫ ♫ I could climb the snow-capped mountains, ♫ ♫ sail the mighty ocean wide. ♫ ♫ I could cross the burning desert, if I had you by my side. ♫ ♫ I could be a king, dear, uncrowned, humble or poor, rich or renowned. ♫ ♫ There is nothing I couldn’t do, if I had you. ♫ Thank you. Well, thank you so much.

Let's look for life in the outer solar system

Freeman Dyson

{0: 'Freeman Dyson'}

{0: ['physicist']}

{0: "With Freeman Dyson's astonishing forecasts for the future, it was hard to tell where science ended and science fiction began. But far from being a wild-eyed visionary, Dyson was a clear and sober thinker -- and one not afraid of controversy or heresy. "}

2003-02-02

2008-07-14

TED2003

en

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

['Planets', 'astronomy', 'biotech', 'exploration', 'extraterrestrial life', 'physics', 'science', 'technology', 'universe', 'astrobiology']

{141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 404: 'The design of the universe', 42: 'Is this our final century?', 178: 'This is Saturn', 876: 'Why we need the explorers', 42247: 'There may be extraterrestrial life in our solar system'}

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

Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that we start looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and out past Neptune, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. He talks about what such life would be like -- and how we might find it.

How will we be remembered in 200 years? I happen to live in a little town, Princeton, in New Jersey, which every year celebrates the great event in Princeton history: the Battle of Princeton, which was, in fact, a very important battle. It was the first battle that George Washington won, in fact, and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence. It happened 225 years ago. It was actually a terrible disaster for Princeton. The town was burned down; it was in the middle of winter, and it was a very, very severe winter. And about a quarter of all the people in Princeton died that winter from hunger and cold, but nobody remembers that. What they remember is, of course, the great triumph, that the Brits were beaten, and we won, and that the country was born. And so I agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered. And that's what we're going through at this time. I wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology, because I think I know very little about that — I'm not a biologist — so everything I know about it can be said in one minute. (Laughter) What I'm saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry, that what really turned computers into a great success, in the world as a whole, is toys. As soon as computers became toys, when kids could come home and play with them, then the industry really took off. And that has to happen with biotech. There's a huge — (Laughter) (Applause) — there's a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists, who are dog breeders, pigeon breeders, orchid breeders, rose breeders, people who handle biology with their hands, and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things, beautiful creatures, plants, animals, pets. These people will be empowered with biotech, and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology. That will blow away a lot of the opposition. When people have this technology in their hands, you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit, grow your own — grow your dog, grow your own cat. (Laughter) (Applause) Just buy the software, you design it. I won't say anymore, you can take it on from there. It's going to happen, and I think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural, becomes part of the human condition, something that everybody's familiar with and everybody accepts. So, let's leave that aside. I want to talk about something quite different, which is what I know about, and that is astronomy. And I'm interested in searching for life in the universe. And it's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that, and that's what I'll talk about for 10 minutes, or whatever the time remains. The important fact is, that most of the real estate that's accessible to us — I'm not talking about the stars, I'm talking about the solar system, the stuff that's within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes — most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the Sun. If you look at the solar system, as we know it today, it has a few planets close to the Sun. That's where we live. It has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the Earth out through — to the orbit of Jupiter. The asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate, but not very large. And it's not very promising for life, since most of it consists of rock and metal, mostly rock. It's not only cold, but very dry. So the asteroids we don't have much hope for. There stand some interesting places a little further out: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Particularly, there's a place called Europa, which is — Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter, where we see a very level ice surface, which looks as if it's floating on top of an ocean. So, we believe that on Europa there is, in fact, a deep ocean. And that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore. Ocean — probably the most likely place for life to originate, just as it originated on the Earth. So we would love to explore Europa, to go down through the ice, find out who is swimming around in the ocean, whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters — whatever there may be that's exciting —- or cephalopods. But that's hard to do. Unfortunately, the ice is thick. We don't know just how thick it is, probably miles thick, so it's very expensive and very difficult to go down there — send down your submarine or whatever it is — and explore. That's something we don't yet know how to do. There are plans to do it, but it's hard. Go out a bit further, you'll find that beyond the orbit of Neptune, way out, far from the Sun, that's where the real estate really begins. You'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which, in what we call the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud — these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the Sun. Mostly, they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system, but they are biologically very interesting indeed, because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals, which are just the right ones for developing life. So if life could be established out there, it would have all the essentials — chemistry and sunlight — everything that's needed. So, what I'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life, rather than on Mars, although Mars is, of course, also a very promising and interesting place. But we can look outside, very cheaply and in a simple fashion. And that's what I'm going to talk about. There is a — imagine that life originated on Europa, and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years. It's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface, just as it did on the Earth. Staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years, finally came out onto the land. And then of course it had great — much greater freedom, and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean. And the step from the ocean to the land was not easy, but it happened. Now, if life had originated on Europa in the ocean, it could also have moved out onto the surface. There wouldn't have been any air there — it's a vacuum. It is out in the cold, but it still could have come. You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice, growing on the surface. What would they need in order to grow on the surface? They'd need, first of all, to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin. So they would have to have something like a reptilian skin. But better — what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight. The sunlight in Jupiter, on the satellites of Jupiter, is 25 times fainter than it is here, since Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun. So they would have to have — these creatures, which I call sunflowers, which I imagine living on the surface of Europa, would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight, so they could keep themselves warm on the surface. Otherwise, they would be at a temperature of minus 150, which is certainly not favorable for developing life, at least of the kind we know. But if they just simply could grow, like leaves, little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight, then they could keep warm on the surface. They could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean; life then could flourish much more. So, why not look? Of course, it's not very likely that there's life on the surface of Europa. None of these things is likely, but my, my philosophy is, look for what's detectable, not for what's probable. There's a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there. And I mean, the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole. This was — originally, when radio astronomy began, Mr. Jansky, at the Bell labs, detected radio waves coming from the sky. And the regular astronomers were scornful about this. They said, "It's all right, you can detect radio waves from the Sun, but the Sun is the only object in the universe that's close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable. You can easily calculate that radio waves from the Sun are fairly faint, and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away, so it certainly will not be detectable. So there's no point in looking." And that, of course, that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years. Since there was nothing there, you might as well not look. Well, of course, as soon as anybody did look, which was after about 20 years, when radio astronomy really took off. Because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum, much brighter than the Sun. So, the same thing could be true for this kind of life, which I'm talking about, on cold objects: that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe, and it's not been detected just because we haven't taken the trouble to look. So, the last thing I want to talk about is how to detect it. There is something called pit lamping. That's the phrase which I learned from my son George, who is there in the audience. You take — that's a Canadian expression. If you happen to want to hunt animals at night, you take a miner's lamp, which is a pit lamp. You strap it onto your forehead, so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal. So, if you go out at night, you shine a flashlight, the animals are bright. You see the red glow in their eyes, which is the reflection of the flashlight. And then, if you're one of these unsporting characters, you shoot the animals and take them home. And of course, that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime, so in Canada that's illegal. In New Zealand, it's legal, because the New Zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits, because the rabbits compete with the sheep in New Zealand. So, the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps, and shine the headlights, and anything that doesn't look like a sheep, you shoot. (Laughter) So I have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe. That if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces — either on Europa, or further out, anywhere where you can live on a cold surface — those creatures must be provided with reflectors. In order to concentrate sunlight, they have to have lenses and mirrors — in order to keep themselves warm. And then, when you shine sunlight at them, the sunlight will be reflected back, just as it is in the eyes of an animal. So these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings. And the further out you go in this, away from the Sun, the more powerful this reflection will be. So actually, this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away, because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background. So as you go further away from the Sun, this becomes more and more powerful. So, in fact, you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth. Why aren't we doing it? Simply because nobody thought of it yet. But I hope that we shall look, and with any — we probably won't find anything, none of these speculations may have any basis in fact. But still, it's a good chance. And of course, if it happens, it will transform our view of life altogether. Because it means that — the way life can live out there, it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet. It's extremely hard to move from one planet to another. We're having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck. Especially if you breathe air, it's very hard to get from planet A to planet B, because there's no air in between. But if you breathe air — (Laughter) — you're dead — (Laughter) — as soon as you're off the planet, unless you have a spaceship. But if you live in a vacuum, if you live on the surface of one of these objects, say, in the Kuiper Belt, this — an object like Pluto, or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of Pluto, and you happened — if you're living on the surface there, and you get knocked off the surface by a collision, then it doesn't change anything all that much. You still are on a piece of ice, you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you're traveling from one place to another. And then if you run into another object, you can stay there and colonize the other object. So life will spread, then, from one object to another. So if it exists at all in the Kuiper Belt, it's likely to be very widespread. And you will have then a great competition amongst species — Darwinian evolution — so there'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision. And there'll be advantages for spreading out long, sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation. I call these creatures sunflowers. They look like, maybe like sunflowers. They have to be all the time pointing toward the Sun, and they will be able to spread out in space, because gravity on these objects is weak. So they can collect sunlight from a big area. So they will, in fact, be quite easy for us to detect. So, I hope in the next 10 years, we'll find these creatures, and then, of course, our whole view of life in the universe will change. If we don't find them, then we can create them ourselves. (Laughter) That's another wonderful opportunity that's opening. We can — as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering, one of the things you can do with your take-it-home, do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit — (Laughter) — is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite, a place like Europa, so we could colonize Europa with our own creatures. That would be a fun thing to do. (Laughter) In the long run, of course, it would also make it possible for us to move out there. What's going to happen in the end, it's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe. And if life is already there, it makes it much more exciting, in the short run. But in the long run, if there's no life there, we create it ourselves. We transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today. So again, we have a big and wonderful future to look forward. Thank you. (Applause)

The brain in love

Helen Fisher

{0: 'Helen Fisher'}

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

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

2008-02-02

2008-07-15

TED2008

en

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

['brain', 'cognitive science', 'culture', 'literature', 'love', 'poetry', 'psychology', 'relationships', 'science', 'technology']

{16: 'Why we love, why we cheat', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 155: 'Telling stories from Africa', 2590: "Technology hasn't changed love. Here's why", 2661: 'A better way to talk about love', 2330: 'Falling in love is the easy part'}

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

Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love -- and people who had just been dumped.

I and my colleagues Art Aron and Lucy Brown and others, have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were happily in love, 15 who had just been dumped, and we're just starting our third experiment: studying people who report that they're still in love after 10 to 25 years of marriage. So, this is the short story of that research. In the jungles of Guatemala, in Tikal, stands a temple. It was built by the grandest Sun King, of the grandest city-state, of the grandest civilization of the Americas, the Mayas. His name was Jasaw Chan K'awiil. He stood over six feet tall. He lived into his 80s, and he was buried beneath this monument in 720 AD. And Mayan inscriptions proclaim that he was deeply in love with his wife. So, he built a temple in her honor, facing his. And every spring and autumn, exactly at the equinox, the sun rises behind his temple, and perfectly bathes her temple with his shadow. And as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon, it perfectly bathes his temple with her shadow. After 1,300 years, these two lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb. Around the world, people love. They sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. As Walt Whitman once said, "O I would stake all for you." Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it. But love isn't always a happy experience. In one study of college students, they asked a lot of questions about love, but the two that stood out to me the most were: "Have you ever been rejected by somebody who you really loved?" And the second question was: "Have you ever dumped somebody who really loved you?" And almost 95 percent of both men and women said yes to both. Almost nobody gets out of love alive. So, before I start telling you about the brain, I want to read for you what I think is the most powerful love poem on Earth. There's other love poems that are, of course, just as good, but I don't think this one can be surpassed. It was told by an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska to a missionary in 1896. And here it is. I've never had the opportunity to say it before. "Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you, consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain — where are you going with my love? I am told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye." Emily Dickinson once wrote, "Parting is all we need to know of hell." How many people have suffered in all the millions of years of human evolution? How many people around the world are dancing with elation at this very minute? Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth. So, several years ago, I decided to look into the brain and study this madness. Our first study of people who were happily in love has been widely publicized, so I'm only going to say very little about it. We found activity in a tiny, little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells, cells that actually make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and spray it to many brain regions. Indeed, this part, the VTA, is part of the brain's reward system. It's way below your cognitive thinking process. It's below your emotions. It's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine. But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high — at least you come down from cocaine. Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can't stop thinking about another human being. Somebody is camping in your head. As an eighth-century Japanese poet said, "My longing had no time when it ceases." Wild is love. And the obsession can get worse when you've been rejected. So, right now, Lucy Brown and I, the neuroscientists on our project, are looking at the data of the people who were put into the machine after they had just been dumped. It was very difficult actually, putting these people in the machine, because they were in such bad shape. (Laughter) So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. We found activity in the brain region, in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love. What a bad deal. You know, when you've been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life — but no, you just love them harder. As the poet Terence, the Roman poet once said, he said, "The less my hope, the hotter my love." And indeed, we now know why. Two thousand years later, we can explain this in the brain. That brain system — the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus — becomes more active when you can't get what you want. In this case, life's greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner. We found activity in other brain regions also — in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses. You're lying there, you're looking at the picture, and you're in this machine, and you're calculating what went wrong. What have I lost? As a matter of fact, Lucy and I have a little joke about this. It comes from a David Mamet play, and there's two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, "Oh, you're a bad pony, I'm not going to bet on you." And indeed, it's this part of the brain, the core of the nucleus accumbens, that is becoming active as you're measuring your gains and losses. It's also the brain region that becomes active when you're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses. Last but not least, we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. No wonder people suffer around the world, and we have so many crimes of passion. When you've been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you're feeling deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is working, and you're feeling intense energy, intense focus, intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all, to win life's greatest prize. So, what have I learned from this experiment that I would like to tell the world? Foremost, I have come to think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive. Not the sex drive — the sex drive gets you looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual. I think of all the poetry that I've read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato over 2,000 years ago. He said, "The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need, it is an urge, it is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out." I've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly. And indeed, it has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it's got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more, and more, and more; withdrawals; and last: relapse. I've got a girlfriend who's just getting over a terrible love affair. It's been about eight months, she's beginning to feel better. And she was driving along in her car the other day, and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man. Not only did the instant craving come back, but she had to pull over from the side of the road and cry. So, one thing I would like the medical community, and the legal community, and even the college community, to see if they can understand, that indeed, romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth. I would also like to tell the world that animals love. There's not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anything that comes along. Too old, too young, too scruffy, too stupid, and they won't do it. Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage — and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with, but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites. As a matter of fact, ethologists know this. There are over eight words for what they call "animal favoritism:" selective proceptivity, mate choice, female choice, sexual choice. And indeed, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction, which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction, and either this same brain region, this reward system, or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. In fact, I think animal attraction can be instant — you can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant. And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call "love at first sight." People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, "Hardly." You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy. And certainly, I make all the same mistakes that everybody else does too, but it's really deepened my understanding and compassion, really, for all human life. As a matter of fact, in New York, I often catch myself looking in baby carriages and feeling a little sorry for the tot. And in fact, sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate, when I think of how intense this brain system is. Our newest experiment has been hatched by my colleague, Art Aron — putting people who are reporting that they are still in love, in a long-term relationship, into the functional MRI. We've put five people in so far, and indeed, we found exactly the same thing. They're not lying. The brain areas associated with intense romantic love still become active, 25 years later. There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love. The question that I'm working on right this minute — and I'm only going to say it for a second, and then end — is, why do you fall in love with one person, rather than another? I never would have even thought to think of this, but Match.com, the Internet dating site, came to me three years ago and asked me that question. And I said, I don't know. I know what happens in the brain, when you do become in love, but I don't know why you fall in love with one person rather than another. And so, I've spent the last three years on this. And there are many reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another, that psychologists can tell you. And we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background, the same general level of intelligence, of good looks, the same religious values. Your childhood certainly plays a role, but nobody knows how. And that's about it, that's all they know. No, they've never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship. So, it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. And I have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine, serotonin, estrogen and testosterone. I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. And on this dating site that I have created, called Chemistry.com, I ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals, and I'm watching who chooses who to love. And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. About 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries. I'm putting the data together now, and at some point — there will always be magic to love, but I think I will come closer to understanding why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background, your same general level of intelligence, good looks, and you don't feel pulled towards all of them. I think there's biology to that. I think we're going to end up, in the next few years, to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms that pull us to one person rather than another. So, I will close with this. These are my older people. Faulkner said, "The past is not dead, it's not even past." Indeed, we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain. And so, there's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature, and this reminds me of it. These are two women. Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. We swivel towards each other, we do what we call the "anchoring gaze" and we talk. This is intimacy to women. I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away. (Laughter) I think it comes from millions of years sitting behind the bush, looking straight ahead, trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock. I think, for millions of years, men faced their enemies, they sat side-by-side with friends. So my final statement is: love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other. Thank you. (Applause)

On technology and faith

Billy Graham

{0: 'Billy Graham'}

{0: ['preacher']}

{0: 'In his long career as a religious evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham spoken to millions around the world and served as advisor to US presidents.'}

1998-02-02

2008-07-16

TED1998

en

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

['Christianity', 'God', 'death', 'faith', 'religion', 'technology']

{71: 'A life of purpose', 112: 'Why would God create a tsunami?', 130: 'We can be Buddhas', 301: 'My year of living biblically', 1891: 'The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death', 1772: 'The doubt essential to faith'}

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

Speaking at TED in 1998, Rev. Billy Graham marvels at technology's power to improve lives and change the world -- but says the end of evil, suffering and death will come only after the world accepts Christ. A legendary talk from TED's archives.

As a clergyman, you can imagine how out of place I feel. I feel like a fish out of water, or maybe an owl out of the air. (Laughter) I was preaching in San Jose some time ago, and my friend Mark Kvamme, who helped introduce me to this conference, brought several CEOs and leaders of some of the companies here in the Silicon Valley to have breakfast with me, or I with them. And I was so stimulated. And had such — it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science. I know that we're near the end of this conference, and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion. Richard can answer that, because he made that decision. But some years ago I was on an elevator in Philadelphia, coming down. I was to address a conference at a hotel. And on that elevator a man said, "I hear Billy Graham is staying in this hotel." And another man looked in my direction and said, "Yes, there he is. He's on this elevator with us." And this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds, and he said, "My, what an anticlimax!" (Laughter) I hope that you won't feel that these few moments with me is not a — is an anticlimax, after all these tremendous talks that you've heard, and addresses, which I intend to listen to every one of them. But I was on an airplane in the east some years ago, and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. His name was John Belk. Some of you will probably know him. And there was a drunk man on there, and he got up out of his seat two or three times, and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do. And he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by, and everybody was upset with him. And finally, John Belk said, "Do you know who's sitting here?" And the man said, "No, who?" He said, "It's Billy Graham, the preacher." He said, "You don't say!" And he turned to me, and he said, "Put her there!" He said, "Your sermons have certainly helped me." (Laughter) And I suppose that that's true with thousands of people. (Laughter) I know that as you have been peering into the future, and as we've heard some of it here tonight, I would like to live in that age and see what is going to be. But I won't, because I'm 80 years old. This is my eightieth year, and I know that my time is brief. I have phlebitis at the moment, in both legs, and that's the reason that I had to have a little help in getting up here, because I have Parkinson's disease in addition to that, and some other problems that I won't talk about. (Laughter) But this is not the first time that we've had a technological revolution. We've had others. And there's one that I want to talk about. In one generation, the nation of the people of Israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the Near East. A man by the name of David came to the throne, and King David became one of the great leaders of his generation. He was a man of tremendous leadership. He had the favor of God with him. He was a brilliant poet, philosopher, writer, soldier — with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today. But about two centuries before David, the Hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron, and, slowly, that skill spread. But they wouldn't allow the Israelis to look into it, or to have any. But David changed all of that, and he introduced the Iron Age to Israel. And the Bible says that David laid up great stores of iron, and which archaeologists have found, that in present-day Palestine, there are evidences of that generation. Now, instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones, Israel now had iron plows, and sickles, and hoes and military weapons. And in the course of one generation, Israel was completely changed. The introduction of iron, in some ways, had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation. And David found that there were many problems that technology could not solve. There were many problems still left. And they're still with us, and you haven't solved them, and I haven't heard anybody here speak to that. How do we solve these three problems that I'd like to mention? The first one that David saw was human evil. Where does it come from? How do we solve it? Over again and again in the Psalms, which Gladstone said was the greatest book in the world, David describes the evils of the human race. And yet he says, "He restores my soul." Have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are? On one hand, we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology, as this conference vividly demonstrates. We've seen under the sea, three miles down, or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future. But on the other hand, something is wrong. Our battleships, our soldiers, are on a frontier now, almost ready to go to war with Iraq. Now, what causes this? Why do we have these wars in every generation, and in every part of the world? And revolutions? We can't get along with other people, even in our own families. We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we can't break. Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death. Even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle. I would like to see Oracle take up that, or some other technological geniuses work on this. How do we change man, so that he doesn't lie and cheat, and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever? The Bible says the problem is within us, within our hearts and our souls. Our problem is that we are separated from our Creator, which we call God, and we need to have our souls restored, something only God can do. Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts: murders, sexual immorality, theft, false testimonies, slander." The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man, but he said, "It's in our hearts that the evil lies, and it's from our hearts that it must be plucked out." Albert Einstein — I was just talking to someone, when I was speaking at Princeton, and I met Mr. Einstein. He didn't have a doctor's degree, because he said nobody was qualified to give him one. (Laughter) But he made this statement. He said, "It's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man." And many of you, I'm sure, have thought about that and puzzled over it. You've seen people take beneficial technological advances, such as the Internet we've heard about tonight, and twist them into something corrupting. You've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems. The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it. King David said that he knew the depths of his own soul. He couldn't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery. Yet King David sought God's forgiveness, and said, "You can restore my soul." You see, the Bible teaches that we're more than a body and a mind. We are a soul. And there's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding. That's the part of us that yearns for God, or something more than we find in technology. Your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life, and which seeks for something beyond this life. It's the part of you that yearns, really, for God. I find [that] young people all over the world are searching for something. They don't know what it is. I speak at many universities, and I have many questions and answer periods, and whether it's Cambridge, or Harvard, or Oxford — I've spoken at all of those universities. I'm going to Harvard in about three or four — no, it's about two months from now — to give a lecture. And I'll be asked the same questions that I was asked the last few times I've been there. And it'll be on these questions: where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What's life all about? Why am I here? Even if you have no religious belief, there are times when you wonder that there's something else. Thomas Edison also said, "When you see everything that happens in the world of science, and in the working of the universe, you cannot deny that there's a captain on the bridge." I remember once, I sat beside Mrs. Gorbachev at a White House dinner. I went to Ambassador Dobrynin, whom I knew very well. And I'd been to Russia several times under the Communists, and they'd given me marvelous freedom that I didn't expect. And I knew Mr. Dobrynin very well, and I said, "I'm going to sit beside Mrs. Gorbachev tonight. What shall I talk to her about?" And he surprised me with the answer. He said, "Talk to her about religion and philosophy. That's what she's really interested in." I was a little bit surprised, but that evening that's what we talked about, and it was a stimulating conversation. And afterward, she said, "You know, I'm an atheist, but I know that there's something up there higher than we are." The second problem that King David realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering. Writing the oldest book in the world was Job, and he said, "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward." Yes, to be sure, science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering. But I'm — in a few months, I'll be 80 years of age. I admit that I'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years. My doctors at the Mayo Clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this — to be here. I haven't given a talk in nearly four months. And when you speak as much as I do, three or four times a day, you get rusty. That's the reason I'm using this podium and using these notes. Every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere, I'm ad-libbing. I'm not reading. I never read an address. I never read a speech or a talk or a lecture. I talk ad lib. But tonight, I've got some notes here so that if I begin to forget, which I do sometimes, I've got something I can turn to. But even here among us, most — in the most advanced society in the world, we have poverty. We have families that self-destruct, friends that betray us. Unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us. I've never met a person in the world that didn't have a problem or a worry. Why do we suffer? It's an age-old question that we haven't answered. Yet David again and again said that he would turn to God. He said, "The Lord is my shepherd." The final problem that David knew he could not solve was death. Many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation. Most people live as if they're never going to die. Technology projects the myth of control over our mortality. We see people on our screens. Marilyn Monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person, and our — many young people think she's still alive. They don't know that she's dead. Or Clark Gable, or whoever it is. The old stars, they come to life. And they're — they're just as great on that screen as they were in person. But death is inevitable. I spoke some time ago to a joint session of Congress, last year. And we were meeting in that room, the statue room. About 300 of them were there. And I said, "There's one thing that we have in common in this room, all of us together, whether Republican or Democrat, or whoever." I said, "We're all going to die. And we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us." And it's often difficult for young people to understand that. It's difficult for them to understand that they're going to die. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, he said, there's every activity under heaven. There's a time to be born, and there's a time to die. I've stood at the deathbed of several famous people, whom you would know. I've talked to them. I've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death. And yet, a few years earlier, death never crossed their mind. I talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor. She said he never thought of God, never talked about God, didn't believe in God. He was an atheist. But she said, as he came to die, he sat up on the side of the bed one day, and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain. And he said, for the first time in his life he'd thought about the inevitable, and about God. Was there a God? A few years ago, a university student asked me, "What is the greatest surprise in your life?" And I said, "The greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life. It passes so fast." But it does not need to have to be that way. Wernher von Braun, in the aftermath of World War II concluded, quote: "science and religion are not antagonists. On the contrary, they're sisters." He put it on a personal basis. I knew Dr. von Braun very well. And he said, "Speaking for myself, I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator." He also said, "In our search to know God, I've come to believe that the life of Jesus Christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration. The reality of this life and His resurrection is the hope of mankind." I've done a lot of speaking in Germany and in France, and in different parts of the world — 105 countries it's been my privilege to speak in. And I was invited one day to visit Chancellor Adenauer, who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern Germany, since the war. And he once — and he said to me, he said, "Young man." He said, "Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?" And I said, "Sir, I do." He said, "So do I." He said, "When I leave office, I'm going to spend my time writing a book on why Jesus Christ rose again, and why it's so important to believe that." In one of his plays, Alexander Solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying, who says to those gathered around his bed, "The moment when it's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying." How should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying? Blaise Pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century France. Pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization. He was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics, even as a teenager. He is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory, and a creator of the first model of a computer. And of course, you are all familiar with the computer language named for him. Pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. He was astounded at the phenomenon we've been considering: that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science, the arts and human enterprise, yet they also are full of anger, hypocrisy and have — and self-hatreds. Pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion. On November 23, 1654, Pascal had a profound religious experience. He wrote in his journal these words: "I submit myself, absolutely, to Jesus Christ, my redeemer." A French historian said, two centuries later, "Seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of Jesus Christ." Pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of God could bring us back into harmony, but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven, and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven. He experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason. It was he who penned the well-known words, "The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not of." Equally well known is Pascal's Wager. Essentially, he said this: "if you bet on God, and open yourself to his love, you lose nothing, even if you're wrong. But if instead you bet that there is no God, then you can lose it all, in this life and the life to come." For Pascal, scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind. He was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39. King David lived to be 70, a long time in his era. Yet he too had to face death, and he wrote these words: "even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." This was David's answer to three dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. It can be yours, as well, as you seek the living God and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future. When I was 17 years of age, I was born and reared on a farm in North Carolina. I milked cows every morning, and I had to milk the same cows every evening when I came home from school. And there were 20 of them that I had — that I was responsible for, and I worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies. I didn't make good grades in high school. I didn't make them in college, until something happened in my heart. One day, I was faced face-to-face with Christ. He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." Can you imagine that? "I am the truth. I'm the embodiment of all truth." He was a liar. Or he was insane. Or he was what he claimed to be. Which was he? I had to make that decision. I couldn't prove it. I couldn't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it. But by faith I said, I believe him, and he came into my heart and changed my life. And now I'm ready, when I hear that call, to go into the presence of God. Thank you, and God bless all of you. (Applause) Thank you for the privilege. It was great. Richard Wurman: You did it. Thanks. (Applause)

My year of living biblically

A.J. Jacobs

{0: 'A.J. Jacobs'}

{0: ['author']}

{0: "Immersing himself in alternate lifestyles and hilarious experiments (usually with himself as the guinea pig), writer A.J. Jacobs tests the limits of behavior, customs, culture -- and reports back on the wisdom and practical knowledge he's gained."}

2007-12-02

2008-07-17

EG 2007

en

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['culture', 'entertainment', 'humanity', 'humor', 'religion', 'writing', 'comedy', 'Best of the Web']

{86: 'Letting go of God', 374: 'Aliens, love -- where are they?', 148: 'The 4 a.m. mystery', 308: 'On technology and faith', 2011: 'Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)', 919: 'Superheroes inspired by Islam'}

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

Author, philosopher, prankster and journalist A.J. Jacobs talks about the year he spent living biblically -- following the rules in the Bible as literally as possible.

I thought I'd tell you a little about what I like to write. And I like to immerse myself in my topics. I just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig. And I see my life as a series of experiments. So, I work for Esquire magazine, and a couple of years ago, I wrote an article called "My Outsourced Life," where I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to live my life for me. So, they answered my emails. They answered my phone. They argued with my wife for me, and they read my son bedtime stories. It was the best month of my life, because I just sat back and I read books and watched movies. It was a wonderful experience. More recently, I wrote an article for Esquire called — about radical honesty. And this is a movement where — this is started by a psychologist in Virginia, who says that you should never, ever lie, except maybe during poker and golf, his only exceptions. And, more than that, whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth. So, I decided I would try this for a month. This was the worst month of my life. (Laughter) I do not recommend this at all. To give you a sense of the experience, the article was called, "I Think You're Fat." (Laughter) So, that was hard. My most recent book — my previous book was called "The Know-It-All," and it was about the year I spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in my quest to learn everything in the world, or more precisely from Aak, which is a type of East Asian music, all the way to Zwyiec, which is — well, I don't want to ruin the ending. (Laughter) It's a very exciting twist ending, like an O. Henry novel, so I won't ruin it. But I love that one, because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb. Although, listening to Kevin Kelly, you don't have to remember anything. You can just Google it. So, I wasted some time there. I love those experiments, but I think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that I've done is my most recent experiment, where I spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible, "The Year of Living Biblically." And I undertook this for two reasons. The first was that I grew up with no religion at all. As I say in my book, I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) So, not very. But I've become increasingly interested in religion. I do think it's the defining issue of our time, or one of the main ones. And I have a son. I want to know what to teach him. So, I decided to dive in head first, and try to live the Bible. The second reason I undertook this is because I'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. So I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing. The first thing I did was I got a stack of bibles. I had Christian bibles. I had Jewish bibles. A friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible, where the twenty-third Psalm is rendered as, "The Lord is all that," as opposed to what I knew it as, "The Lord is my shepherd." Then I went down and I read several versions, and I wrote down every single law that I could find. And this was a very long list — over 700 rules. And they range from the famous ones that I had heard of — The Ten Commandments, love your neighbor, be fruitful and multiply. So I wanted to follow those. And actually, I take my projects very seriously, because I had twins during my year, so I definitely take my projects seriously. But I also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the Bible. There is the law in Leviticus, "You cannot shave the corners of your beard." I didn't know where my corners were, so I decided to let the whole thing grow, and this is what I looked like by the end. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time at airport security. (Laughter) My wife wouldn't kiss me for the last two months. So, certainly the challenge was there. The Bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers, so I thought, "Sounds strange, but I'll try it." You only know if you try it. I got rid of all my poly-cotton T-shirts. The Bible says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man, then her hand shall be cut off. So, I wanted to follow that rule. (Laughter) That one I followed by default, by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby, looking like she had a strong grip. (Laughter) So — oh, there's another shot of my beard. I will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing, and incredibly challenging. And there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging. The first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day. You know, I could spend a year not killing, but spending a year not gossiping, not coveting, not lying — you know, I live in New York, and I work as a journalist, so this was 75, 80 percent of my day I had to do it. But it was really interesting, because I was able to make some progress, because I couldn't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts. This was one of the huge lessons of the year, is that I almost pretended to be a better person, and I became a little bit of a better person. So I had always thought, you know, "You change your mind, and you change your behavior," but it's often the other way around. You change your behavior, and you change your mind. So, you know, if you want to become more compassionate, you visit sick people in the hospital, and you will become more compassionate. You donate money to a cause, and you become emotionally involved in that cause. So, it really was cognitive psychology — you know, cognitive dissonance — that I was experiencing. The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology, very primitive cognitive psychology. In the Proverbs, it says that if you smile, you will become happier, which, as we know, is actually true. The second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century America. And perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers. (Laughter) But it's a big part of the Bible, so I figured I had to address it. So, I was able to stone one adulterer. It happened — I was in the park, and I was dressed in my biblical clothing, so sandals and sort of a white robe, you know, because again, the outer affects the inner. I wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind. And this man came up to me and he said, "Why are you dressed like that?" And I explained my project, and he said, "Well, I am an adulterer, are you going to stone me?" And I said, "Well, that would be great!" (Laughter) And I actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that I had been carrying around for weeks, hoping for just this interaction — and, you know, they were pebbles — but he grabbed them out of my hand. He was actually an elderly man, mid-70s, just so you know. But he's still an adulterer, and still quite angry. He grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face, and I felt that I could — eye for an eye — I could retaliate, and throw one back at him. So that was my experience stoning, and it did allow me to talk about, in a more serious way, these big issues. How can the Bible be so barbaric in some places, and yet so incredibly wise in others? How should we view the Bible? Should we view it, you know, as original intent, like a sort of a Scalia version of the Bible? How was the Bible written? And actually, since this is a tech crowd, I talk in the book about how the Bible actually reminds me of the Wikipedia, because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. And it's sort of evolved. It's not a book that was written and came down from on high. So I thought I would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways, the bigger lessons that I learned from my year. The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. This became very, very clear, early on. Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person, and stoning adulterers, or — here's another example. Well, that's another. I did spend some time shepherding. (Laughter) It's a very relaxing vocation. I recommend it. But this one is — the Bible says that you cannot touch women during certain times of the month, and more than that, you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat. And my wife thought this was very offensive, so she sat in every seat in our apartment, and I had to spend much of the year standing until I bought my own seat and carried it around. So, you know, I met with creationists. I went to the creationists' museum. And these are the ultimate literalists. And it was fascinating, because they were not stupid people at all. I would wager that their IQ is exactly the same as the average evolutionist. It's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the Bible that they distort all the data to fit their model. And they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this. And I will say, though, the museum is gorgeous. They really did a fantastic job. If you're ever in Kentucky, there's, you can see a movie of the flood, and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes. So, whatever you think of creationism — and I think it's crazy — they did a great job. (Laughter) Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks. And this one was a big lesson because I was praying, giving these prayers of thanksgiving, which was odd for an agnostic. But I was saying thanks all the time, every day, and I started to change my perspective. And I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day, that I didn't even notice, that I took for granted, as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong. So, this is actually a key to happiness for me, is to just remember when I came over here, the car didn't flip over, and I didn't trip coming up the stairs. It's a remarkable thing. Third, that thou shall have reverence. This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic, and by the end of the year, I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic, which I love. And I'm trying to start it as a movement. So, if anyone wants to join, the basic idea is, whether or not there is a God, there's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness, and that our rituals can be sacred. The Sabbath can be sacred. This was one of the great things about my year, doing the Sabbath, because I am a workaholic, so having this one day where you cannot work, it really, that changed my life. So, this idea of sacredness, whether or not there is a God. Thou shall not stereotype. This one happened because I spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout America because I wanted it to be more than about my journey. I wanted it to be about religion in America. So, I spent time with evangelical Christians, and Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. I'm very proud because I think I'm the only person in America to out Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. (Laughter) After three and a half hours, he looked at his watch, he's like, "I gotta go." (Laughter) Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Bless you, bless you. But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about, for instance, evangelical Christianity, and I found that it's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it. There's a group I met with called the Red Letter Christians, and they focus on the red words in the Bible, which are the ones that Jesus spoke. That's how they printed them in the old Bibles. And their argument is that Jesus never talked about homosexuality. They have a pamphlet that says, "Here's what Jesus said about homosexuality," and you open it up, and there's nothing in it. So, they say Jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts, helping poor people. So, this was very inspiring to me. I recommend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. They're very inspiring leaders, even though I disagree with much of what they say. Also, thou shalt not disregard the irrational. This one was very unexpected because, you know, I grew up with the scientific worldview, and I was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces. And the thing is, if they're not harmful, they're not to be completely dismissed. Because I learned that — I was thinking, I was doing all these rituals, these biblical rituals, separating my wool and linen, and I would ask these religious people "Why would the Bible possibly tell us to do this? Why would God care?" And they said, "We don't know, but it's just rituals that give us meaning." And I would say, "But that's crazy." And they would say, "Well, what about you? You blow out candles on top of a birthday cake. If a guy from Mars came down and saw, here's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics, would the Martians say, 'Well, that guy, he makes sense, but that guy's crazy?'" So no, I think that rituals are, by nature, irrational. So the key is to choose the right rituals, the ones that are not harmful — but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed. And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. And I failed miserably. Because you can't. You have to pick and choose. And anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. The key is to pick and choose the right parts. There's the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they'll say, "Oh, it's just cafeteria religion. You're just picking and choosing." But my argument is, "What's wrong with cafeterias?" I've had some great meals at cafeterias. I've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. So, it's about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it. And I thought I'd end with just a couple more. There's me reading the Bible. That's how I hailed taxicabs. (Laughter) Seriously, and it worked. And yes, that was actually a rented sheep, so I had to return that in the morning, but it served well for a day. So, anyway, thank you so much for letting me speak.

Brain magic

Keith Barry

{0: 'Keith Barry'}

{0: ['magician']}

{0: 'Think of Keith Barry as a hacker of the human brain -- writing routines that exploit its bugs and loopholes, and offering a revealing look at the software between our ears.'}

2004-02-02

2008-07-18

TED2004

en

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['brain', 'entertainment', 'illusion', 'magic']

{44912: 'Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head', 1821: 'The art of misdirection', 2332: 'How to find work you love', 1479: 'Pop an ollie and innovate!', 2792: 'How to find a wonderful idea', 1347: 'The secret structure of great talks'}

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

First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.

Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense. I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody. I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. OK, clap them together, once. OK, reverse your hands. Now, follow my actions exactly. Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. Cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb — that's very important. Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. All right. Tap them together once. OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) Now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how. (Laughter) Now, I remember when I was about 15, (Laughter) I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters — there's still people trying to do it — (Laughter) — who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. And she was completely blind. She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. How could somebody read using their fingertips? You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind — a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. How could somebody read using their fingertips? Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. So, let's take a look. (Video) Man: There we go. I'm going to guide you into the car. Kathryn Thomas: (Laughter) Man: You're OK, keep on going. KT: How are you? Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold. KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: But you're OK? KT: Yes. KB: No way to see through it? KT: No. KB: I'll take it off. Do you want to take the rest off? Take it off, you're OK. We'll stop for a second. KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see. KB: You're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. Have you ever heard of second sight? KT: No. KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. And I'm going to try that right now. KT: God. KB: Are you ready? Where is it? There's no way — KT: (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see. KT: There's a wall, there's a wall. KB: Look at the road, look at the road. KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God! KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No. KB: Sure there's not? KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. I'm looking at the road, all the time. I'm not taking my eyes off the road. (Beep) (Beep) (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! KB: Where are we? Where are we? We're going uphill, are we going uphill? KT: Look at the road — (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on. KB: What? KT: How are you doing this? KB: Just don't break my concentration. We're OK, though? KT: Yes. That's so weird. We're nearly there. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! KB: And I've stopped. KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life! (Applause) KB: Thank you. By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had, I think it was a nine-millimeter, stuck to his leg. So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it. So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? That's the question. Now, most people here would automatically say no. OK, but I want you to realize some facts. I couldn't see through the blindfold. The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. The girl, I'd never met before, all right. So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark. This is because magic is all about directing attention. If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, then I don't look at it. But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. You see, it's very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways. I'm going to give you some demonstrations right now. I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? Do you mind? Yes, at the end. OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. You might want to use the stairs, there. (Applause) It's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you. You don't know what will happen, right? Would you mind just standing over here for a moment? Your name is? Nicole: Nicole. KB: Nicole, and? (Telephone ringing) KB: Actually, here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it. (Laughter) Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone. KB: OK, swap over positions. Can you stand over here? This will make it easier. Pity, I would have told them it was the ace of spades. OK, a little bit closer. (Laughter) OK, a little bit closer, come over — they look really nervous up here. Do you believe in witchcraft? Nicole: No. KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No. KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No. KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we'll try a voodoo experiment. I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations. Yes or no, did you feel anything? Nicole: Yes. KB: You did feel that? What did you feel? Nicole: A touch on my back. KB: How many times did you feel it? Nicole: Twice. KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. Extend your left arm, OK. OK, keep it there. Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK. Did you feel anything, there? Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel? Nicole: Three — KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes. KB: Can you show us where? OK, excellent. Open your eyes. I never touched you. I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. A voodoo experiment. (Laughter) Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this. (Laughter) You just take a seat over here for a second. I'm going to use you again, in a moment. Can you take a seat right over here, if you don't mind. Sit right here. Man: OK. KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. Close your eyes right now. OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here. I want you to hold it there just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. That's it, all the way down, all the way down. and further, and further. Excellent. I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. OK, now, allow it to stay there. OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. Just be aware of the pressure. And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. Do you understand? Just answer yes or no. Man: Yes. KB: Hold it right there. And only when you feel the pressure go back, allow your hand to drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure. (Laughter) OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again. Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. Can you stand up? Just stand, stage forward. I want you to point directly at his forehead. OK. Imagine a connection between you and him. Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want it to be released. You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. OK, let's try it again. OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. Point directly at his forehead. Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again. OK, it worked that time, excellent. And hold it there, both of you. Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. You can wait as long as you want. You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK. Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. Most people ask you, "What the hell just happened up here?" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. On five, four, three, two, one — open your eyes, wide awake. Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats. (Applause) OK, you can go back. (Applause) I once saw a film called "The Gods Are Crazy." Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. Remember when they threw the Coke out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. Do you want to try it? Good job. She's not taking any chances. (Laughter) You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth. We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. And you can whack it against the table, if you want; be careful. Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. I want you to examine the shard of glass. Careful, it's sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. Now, hold it out here. I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. But I want you to take this very seriously. Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. Think of that guy, that ba — that guy. (Laughter) I'm trying to be good here. OK, and when you feel the sensation — it might take a while — drop it into the glass. OK, drop it in. Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side. (Burst) (Laughter) That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there. (Laughter) (Applause) I also want you to look at me and think of his name. OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. There's five letters in the title. You didn't react to that, so it's four letters. Think of one of the letters in the title. There's a K in his name, there is a K. I knew that because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him. Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm. KB: OK, give her a round of applause. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause ends) I've got one more thing to share with you right now. Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing. Chris Anderson: Oh, OK. KB: I was going to use you, but I decided I might want to come back another year. (Laughter) CA: Well, to reward him for saying "eureka," and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us — Steve Jurvetson. KB: OK, Steve, come on up here. (Applause) CA: You knew! KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. Now, Steve — oh, you can check underneath. Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. They insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. There you are, OK. (Laughter) I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. One, two, three and four. Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. Happy? Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes. KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right? SJ: No one in the audience? KB: Yes, and just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. OK, and tell me when you're done. (Laughter) (Laughter) KB: You done? SJ: Almost. KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. Oh, we've got one here, we've got one here. (Applause) So, all right, we'll leave them like that. (Laughter) I'm going to have the last laugh, though. (Laughter) Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. No, stay around, OK. Now, Steve, look back. Now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either. Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold? SJ: Put this on? KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? No? SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: Excellent. Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. Don't move the cups, I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up. I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. My hand is at risk here. (Laughter) Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done. KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. Tell me when I'm over a cup. SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now? SJ: Mm-hmm. KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no? SJ: Oh! (Laughter) KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh. (Laughter) SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision. (Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here? SJ: Can we do the left hand? KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not. (Laughter) KB: If I go this way, is there another cup? SJ: Yes. KB: Tell me when to stop. SJ: OK. KB: There? SJ: Yes, there's one. KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine. (Laughter) SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision. (Laughter) OK, give me both hands. Now, put them on both cups. Do you think the spike is under your left or your right hand? SJ: Neither. KB: Neither, oh, OK. But if you were to guess. (Laughter) SJ: Under my right hand. KB: Under your right hand? Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. Psychologists, figure this out. (SJ gasps) Have a look. SJ: Oh! (Applause) KB: Thank you. (Applause ends) If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

The new era of positive psychology

Martin Seligman

{0: 'Martin Seligman'}

{0: ['psychologist']}

{0: 'Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology, a field of study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism.'}

2004-02-02

2008-07-21

TED2004

en

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

['brain', 'education', 'happiness', 'psychology', 'science', 'technology', 'personality', 'introvert', 'evolutionary psychology', 'emotions']

{97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 93: 'The paradox of choice', 16: 'Why we love, why we cheat', 191: 'The habits of happiness', 2861: "There's more to life than being happy", 787: 'Plug into your hard-wired happiness'}

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

Martin Seligman talks about psychology -- as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?

When I was President of the American Psychological Association, they tried to media-train me. And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today, which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic. The editor of Discover told us 10 of them; I'm going to give you the eleventh. So they came to me, CNN, and they said, "Professor Seligman — would you tell us about the state of psychology today? We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great." And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite." I said, "Well, how many words do I get?" And she said, "Well, one." (Laughter) And the cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Good." (Laughter) "Cut! Cut. That won't do. We'd really better give you a longer sound bite." "How many words do I get this time?" "Well, you get two." (Laughter) "Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good." (Laughter) "Look, Doctor Seligman, we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium. We'd better give you a real sound bite. This time you can have three words. Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good enough." That's what I'm going to be talking about. I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good, and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough. And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology, about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar. So, why was psychology good? Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model. Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me, because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony. And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me. What was good about psychology — about the $30 billion investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology — is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable; it was entirely smoke and mirrors. And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable, two of them actually curable. And the other thing that happened is that a science developed, a science of mental illness. We found out we could take fuzzy concepts like depression, alcoholism, and measure them with rigor; that we could create a classification of the mental illnesses; that we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses. We could look across time at the same people — people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia — and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years, to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments. And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random-assignment, placebo-controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. The conclusion of that is, psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it. But what was not good, the consequences of that, were three things. The first was moral; that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers; that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you. And we forgot that people made choices and decisions. We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost. The second cost was that we forgot about you people. We forgot about improving normal lives. We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word. No one works on that. And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier — positive interventions. So that was not good. And so that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert, Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call, "positive psychology," which has three aims. The first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness. It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. It should be interested in the best things in life. And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling, and with genius, with nurturing high talent. So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness. And any of you, for free, can go to that website — [www.authentichappiness.org] and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness. You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity, as a cause of happiness. I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people, and I've asked the question: How do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you? And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people. How do they differ from the rest of us? It turns out there's one way, very surprising — they're not more religious, they're not in better shape, they don't have more money, they're not better looking, they don't have more good events and fewer bad events. The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social. They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning. (Laughter) They don't spend time alone. Each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends. But watch out here — this is merely correlational data, not causal, and it's about happiness in the first, "Hollywood" sense, I'm going to talk about, happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer. And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment. We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins. About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy. And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them, and we actually carry out random-assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies. That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier? In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results. But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is, can psychology actually make people happier? And to ask that question — "happy" is not a word I use very much — we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about "happy." And I believe there are three different — I call them "different" because different interventions build them, it's possible to have one rather than the other — three different happy lives. The first happy life is the pleasant life. This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. The second is a life of engagement: a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure; time stops for you. That's what Aristotle was talking about. And third, the meaningful life. I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them. The first life is the pleasant life, and it's simply, as best we can find it, it's having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can, and learning the skills — savoring, mindfulness — that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space. But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology, and why it doesn't end here. The first drawback is, it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. So the different tricks that Matthieu and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed. It's all like French vanilla ice cream: the first taste is 100 percent; by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone. And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable. And this leads to the second life. I have to tell you about my friend Len, to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion, more than building pleasure. In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work. By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company. Second, in play, he's a national champion bridge player. But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure. And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. (Laughter) Len is an introvert. American women said to Len, when he dated them, "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma. It turned out that — Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and watched football, and played bridge. Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities. The question is: Is Len unhappy? And I want to say, not. Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity, I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness, and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell. When the first card is played till 10 days later, when the tournament is over, time stops for Len. And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about, about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way: pleasure has raw feel — you know it's happening; it's thought and feeling. But what Mike told you yesterday — during flow ... you can't feel anything. You're one with the music. Time stops. You have intense concentration. And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life. And we think there's a recipe for it, and it's knowing what your highest strengths are — again, there's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are — and then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can. Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting. Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's. Hated the job. She's working her way through college. Her highest strength was social intelligence. So she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day. Now, obviously she failed. But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. You don't look like Debbie Reynolds. You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption. So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion; the second path is eudaemonian flow; and the third path is meaning. This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. And meaning, in this view, consists of — very parallel to eudaemonia — it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives — the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life — people are now hard at work on the question: Are there things that lastingly change those lives? And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it. It's being done in a rigorous manner. It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works. So we do random-assignment, placebo-controlled, long-term studies of different interventions. Just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect: when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day, and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures. And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced. Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would. Close your eyes. I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. The person has to be alive. Now, OK, you can open your eyes. I hope all of you have such a person. Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit, is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, call them on the phone in Phoenix, ask if you can visit, don't tell them why. Show up at their door, you read the testimonial — everyone weeps when this happens. And what happens is, when we test people one week later, a month later, three months later, they're both happier and less depressed. Another example is a strengths date, in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test, and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths. We find this is a strengthener of relationships. And fun versus philanthropy. It's so heartening to be in a group like this, in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy. Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this, so we actually have people do something altruistic and do something fun, and contrast it. And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts. So those are examples of positive interventions. So the next to last thing I want to say is: we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. This is really what you're about. And that's our target variable. And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? So we ask — and we've done this in 15 replications, involving thousands of people: To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction? And our results surprised us; they were backward of what we thought. It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. Which is to say, the full life — the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three. Conversely, if you have none of the three, the empty life, the sum is less than the parts. And what we're asking now is: Does the very same relationship — physical health, morbidity, how long you live and productivity — follow the same relationship? That is, in a corporation, is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning? Is health a function of positive engagement, of pleasure, and of meaning in life? And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes. So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard, and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this. I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much, which was one of the remarkable things. But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way: we all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. We also know that technology, entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery. And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. And I never found that; I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero; that they were empty. And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning, are different from the skills of relieving misery. And so, the parallel thing holds with technology, entertainment and design, I believe. That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion. And that's typically how they've been used. But once you fractionate happiness the way I do — not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough — there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. As Laura Lee told us, design and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism, in addition to the space elevator, is that I think with technology, entertainment and design, we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet. And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough. If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion, meaning eudaemonia, it will be good enough. And if design can increase positive emotion, eudaemonia, and flow and meaning, what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you. (Applause)

The wonder of Zulu wire art

Marisa Fick-Jordan

{0: 'Marisa Fick-Jordan'}

{0: ['craft artist', 'product designer']}

{0: 'South African product designer Marisa Fick-Jordan works with Zulu wire artists to develop a sustainable, worldwide market for their bold and shimmering work.'}

2007-06-06

2008-07-21

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'art', 'business', 'design']

{127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 64: 'Happiness in body and soul', 204: 'Tales of passion', 1692: 'Play with smart materials', 971: 'Are mushrooms the new plastic?', 1122: 'Open-sourced blueprints for civilization'}

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

In this short, image-packed talk, Marisa Fick-Jordan talks about how a village of traditional Zulu wire weavers built a worldwide market for their dazzling work.

The decorative use of wire in southern Africa dates back hundreds of years. But modernization actually brought communication and a whole new material, in the form of telephone wire. Rural to urban migration meant that newfound industrial materials started to replace hard-to-come-by natural grasses. So, here you can see the change from use — starting to use contemporary materials. These pieces date back from the '40s to the late '50s. In the '90s, my interest and passion for transitional art forms led me to a new form, which came from a squatter camp outside Durban. And I got the opportunity to start working with this community at that point, and started developing, really, and mentoring them in terms of scale, in terms of the design. And the project soon grew from five to 50 weavers in about a year. Soon we had outgrown the scrap yards, what they could provide, so we coerced a wire manufacturer to help us, and not only to supply the materials on bobbins, but to produce to our color specifications. At the same time, I was thinking, well, there's lots of possibility here to produce contemporary products, away from the ethnic, a little bit more contemporary. So I developed a whole range around — mass-produced range — that obviously fitted into a much higher-end decor market that could be exported and also service our local market. We started experimenting, as you can see, in terms of shapes, forms. The scale became very important, and it's become our pet project. It's successful, it's been running for 12 years. And we supply the Conran shops, and Donna Karan, and so it's kind of great. This is our group, our main group of weavers. They come on a weekly basis to Durban. They all have bank accounts. They've all moved back to the rural area where they came from. It's a weekly turnaround of production. This is the community that I originally showed you the slide of. And that's also modernized today, and it's supporting work for 300 weavers. And the rest says it all. Thank you very much. (Applause)

On humanity

Chris Abani

{0: 'Chris Abani'}

{0: ['novelist', 'poet']}

{0: 'Imprisoned three times by the Nigerian government, Chris Abani turned his experience into poems that Harold Pinter called "the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable." His novels include <em>GraceLand</em> (2004) and <em>The Virgin of Flames</em> (2007).'}

2008-02-02

2008-07-22

TED2008

en

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

['Africa', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'humanity', 'humor', 'literature', 'poetry', 'writing']

{155: 'Telling stories from Africa', 64: 'Happiness in body and soul', 204: 'Tales of passion', 1136: 'The mothers who found forgiveness, friendship', 562: 'Odes to vice and consequences', 1013: 'Women, wartime and the dream of peace'}

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

Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It's "ubuntu," he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us. Because I really believe that we're never more beautiful than when we're most ugly. Because that's really the moment we really know what we're made of. As Chris said, I grew up in Nigeria with a whole generation — in the '80s — of students who were protesting a military dictatorship, which has finally ended. So it wasn't just me, there was a whole generation of us. But what I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa, they have a phrase called Ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. But if you're like me, my humanity is more like a window. I don't really see it, I don't pay attention to it until there's, you know, like a bug that's dead on the window. Then suddenly I see it, and usually, it's never good. It's usually when I'm cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes. So what Ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people. It's really very simple, but really very complicated. So, I thought I should start with some stories. I should tell you some stories about remarkable people, so I thought I'd start with my mother. (Laughter) And she was dark, too. My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English. This is how English my mother is — or was, she just passed. She came out to California, to Los Angeles, to visit me, and we went to Malibu, which she thought was very disappointing. (Laughter) And then we went to a fish restaurant, and we had Chad, the surfer dude, serving us, and he came up and my mother said, "Do you have any specials, young man?" And Chad says, "Sure, like, we have this, like, salmon, that's, like, rolled in this, like, wasabi, like, crust. It's totally rad." And my mother turned to me and said, "What language is he speaking?" (Laughter) I said, "English, mum." And she shook her head and said, "Oh, these Americans. We gave them a language, why don't they use it?" (Laughter) So, this woman, who converted from the Church of England to Catholicism when she married my father — and there's no one more rabid than a Catholic convert — decided to teach in the rural areas in Nigeria, particularly among Igbo women, the Billings ovulation method, which was the only approved birth control by the Catholic Church. But her Igbo wasn't too good. So she took me along to translate. I was seven. (Laughter) So, here are these women, who never discuss their period with their husbands, and here I am telling them, "Well, how often do you get your period?" (Laughter) And, "Do you notice any discharges?" (Laughter) And, "How swollen is your vulva?" (Laughter) She never would have thought of herself as a feminist, my mother, but she always used to say, "Anything a man can do, I can fix." (Applause) And when my father complained about this situation, where she's taking a seven-year-old boy to teach this birth control, you know, he used to say, "Oh, you're turning him into — you're teaching him how to be a woman." My mother said, "Someone has to." (Laughter) This woman — during the Biafran war, we were caught in the war. It was my mother with five little children. It takes her one year, through refugee camp after refugee camp, to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country. At every single refugee camp, she has to face off soldiers who want to take my elder brother Mark, who was nine, and make him a boy soldier. Can you imagine this five-foot-two woman, standing up to men with guns who want to kill us? All through that one year, my mother never cried one time, not once. But when we were in Lisbon, in the airport, about to fly to England, this woman saw my mother wearing this dress, which had been washed so many times it was basically see through, with five really hungry-looking kids, came over and asked her what had happened. And she told this woman. And so this woman emptied out her suitcase and gave all of her clothes to my mother, and to us, and the toys of her kids, who didn't like that very much, but — (Laughter) — that was the only time she cried. And I remember years later, I was writing about my mother, and I asked her, "Why did you cry then?" And she said, "You know, you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror. But the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you." The old women in my father's village, after this war had happened, memorized the names of every dead person, and they would sing these dirges, made up of these names. Dirges so melancholic that they would scorch you. And they would sing them only when they planted the rice, as though they were seeding the hearts of the dead into the rice. But when it came for harvest time, they would sing these joyful songs, that were made up of the names of every child who had been born that year. And then the next planting season, when they sang the dirge, they would remove as many names of the dead that equaled as many people that were born. And in this way, these women enacted a lot of transformation, beautiful transformation. Did you know, that before the genocide in Rwanda, the word for rape and the word for marriage was the same one? But today, women are rebuilding Rwanda. Did you also know that after apartheid, when the new government went into the parliament houses, there were no female toilets in the building? Which would seem to suggest that apartheid was entirely the business of men. All of this to say, that despite the horror, and despite the death, women are never really counted. Their humanity never seems to matter very much to us. When I was growing up in Nigeria — and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from — there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women, that's essentially what it is. And a lot of rituals involved killing, killing little animals, progressing along, so when I turned 13 — and, I mean, it made sense, it was an agrarian community, somebody had to kill the animals, there was no Whole Foods you could go and get kangaroo steak at — so when I turned 13, it was my turn now to kill a goat. And I was this weird, sensitive kid, who couldn't really do it, but I had to do it. And I was supposed to do this alone. But a friend of mine, called Emmanuel, who was significantly older than me, who'd been a boy soldier during the Biafran war, decided to come with me. Which sort of made me feel good, because he'd seen a lot of things. Now, when I was growing up, he used to tell me stories about how he used to bayonet people, and their intestines would fall out, but they would keep running. So, this guy comes with me. And I don't know if you've ever heard a goat, or seen one — they sound like human beings, that's why we call tragedies "a song of a goat." My friend Brad Kessler says that we didn't become human until we started keeping goats. Anyway, a goat's eyes are like a child's eyes. So when I tried to kill this goat and I couldn't, Emmanuel bent down, he puts his hand over the mouth of the goat, covers its eyes, so I don't have to look into them, while I kill the goat. It didn't seem like a lot, for this guy who'd seen so much, and to whom the killing of a goat must have seemed such a quotidian experience, still found it in himself to try to protect me. I was a wimp. I cried for a very long time. And afterwards, he didn't say a word. He just sat there watching me cry for an hour. And then afterwards he said to me, "It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak. Just know that it is enough sometimes to know that it is difficult." Of course, talking about goats makes me think of sheep, and not in good ways. (Laughter) So, I was born two days after Christmas. So growing up, you know, I had a cake and everything, but I never got any presents, because, born two days after Christmas. So, I was about nine, and my uncle had just come back from Germany, and we had the Catholic priest over, my mother was entertaining him with tea. And my uncle suddenly says, "Where are Chris' presents?" And my mother said, "Don't talk about that in front of guests." But he was desperate to show that he'd just come back, so he summoned me up, and he said, "Go into the bedroom, my bedroom. Take anything you want out of the suitcase. It's your birthday present." I'm sure he thought I'd take a book or a shirt, but I found an inflatable sheep. (Laughter) So, I blew it up and ran into the living room, my finger where it shouldn't have been, I was waving this buzzing sheep around, and my mother looked like she was going to die of shock. (Laughter) And Father McGetrick was completely unflustered, just stirred his tea and looked at my mother and said, "It's all right Daphne, I'm Scottish." (Laughter) (Applause) My last days in prison, the last 18 months, my cellmate — for the last year, the first year of the last 18 months — my cellmate was 14 years old. The name was John James, and in those days, if a family member committed a crime, the military would hold you as ransom till your family turned themselves in. So, here was this 14-year-old kid on death row. And not everybody on death row was a political prisoner. There were some really bad people there. And he had smuggled in two comics, two comic books — "Spiderman" and "X-Men." He was obsessed. And when he got tired of reading them, he started to teach the men in death row how to read, with these comic books. And so, I remember night after night, you'd hear all these men, these really hardened criminals, huddled around John James, reciting, "Take that, Spidey!" (Laughter) It's incredible. I was really worried. He didn't know what death row meant. I'd been there twice, and I was terribly afraid that I was going to die. And he would always laugh, and say, "Come on, man, we'll make it out." Then I'd say, "How do you know?" And he said, "Oh, I heard it on the grapevine." They killed him. They handcuffed him to a chair, and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail, then left him there to bleed to death. That's how I ended up in solitary, because I let my feelings be known. All around us, everywhere, there are people like this. The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god. But if the god became unruly and began to ask for human sacrifice, the Igbos would destroy the god. They would knock down the shrine, and they would stop saying the god's name. This is how they came to reclaim their humanity. Every day, all of us here, we're building gods that have gone rampant, and it's time we started knocking them down and forgetting their names. It doesn't require a tremendous thing. All it requires is to recognize among us, every day — the few of us that can see — are surrounded by people like the ones I've told you. There are some of you in this room, amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity. I want to end with a poem by an American poet called Lucille Clifton. The poem is called "Libation," and it's for my friend Vusi who is in the audience here somewhere. "Libation, North Carolina, 1999. I offer to this ground, this gin. I imagine an old man crying here, out of the sight of the overseer. He pushes his tongue through a hole where his tooth would be, if he were whole. It aches in that space where his tooth would be, where his land would be, his house, his wife, his son, his beautiful daughter. He wipes sorrow from his face, and puts his thirsty finger to his thirsty tongue, and tastes the salt. I call a name that could be his. This is for you, old man. This gin, this salty earth." Thank you. (Applause)

A dig for humanity's origins

Louise Leakey

{0: 'Louise Leakey'}

{0: ['paleoanthropologist']}

{0: 'Louise Leakey hunts for hominid fossils in East Africa, in the family tradition.'}

2008-02-02

2008-07-23

TED2008

en

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

['Africa', 'ancient world', 'anthropology', 'apes', 'evolution', 'human origins', 'humanity', 'paleontology', 'science']

{168: "The search for humanity's roots", 323: 'A family tree for humanity', 69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 35353: 'How a new species of ancestors is changing our theory of human evolution', 340: 'How humans and animals can live together', 607: 'I believe we evolved from aquatic apes'}

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

Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind -- and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape. This could be us. We belong to the family called the Hominidae. We are the species called Homo sapiens sapiens, and it's important to remember that, in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet Earth. We are one species of about five and a half thousand mammalian species that exist on planet Earth today. And that's just a tiny fraction of all species that have ever lived on the planet in past times. We're one species out of approximately, or let's say, at least 16 upright-walking apes that have existed over the past six to eight million years. But as far as we know, we're the only upright-walking ape that exists on planet Earth today, except for the bonobos. And it's important to remember that, because the bonobos are so human, and they share 99 percent of their genes with us. And we share our origins with a handful of the living great apes. It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future. And it is important to remember that all of these great apes have come on as long and as interesting evolutionary journey as we ourselves have today. And it's this journey that is of such interest to humanity, and it's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family, as we've been in East Africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past. And this is how we look for them. A group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of Africa, looking for small fragments of bone, fossil bone, that may be on the surface. And that's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in Northern Kenya, looking for fossils. I doubt many of you in the audience can see the fossil that's in this picture, but if you look very carefully, there is a jaw, a lower jaw, of a 4.1-million-year-old upright-walking ape as it was found at Lake Turkana on the west side. (Laughter) It's extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive and it is something that is going to involve a lot more people, to begin to piece together our past. We still really haven't got a very complete picture of it. When we find a fossil, we mark it. Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it. And we can bring all this information into big GIS packages, today. When we then find something very important, like the bones of a human ancestor, we begin to excavate it extremely carefully and slowly, using dental picks and fine paintbrushes. And all the sediment is then put through these screens, and where we go again through it very carefully, looking for small bone fragments, and it's then washed. And these things are so exciting. They are so often the only, or the very first time that anybody has ever seen the remains. And here's a very special moment, when my mother and myself were digging up some remains of human ancestors. And it is one of the most special things to ever do with your mother. (Laughter) Not many people can say that. But now, let me take you back to Africa, two million years ago. I'd just like to point out, if you look at the map of Africa, it does actually look like a hominid skull in its shape. Now we're going to go to the East African and the Rift Valley. It essentially runs up from the Gulf of Aden, or runs down to Lake Malawi. And the Rift Valley is a depression. It's a basin, and rivers flow down from the highlands into the basin, carrying sediment, preserving the bones of animals that lived there. If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you. (Laughter) OK, so it is absolutely surprising that we know as much as we do know today about our ancestors, because it's incredibly difficult, A, for these things to become — to be — preserved, and secondly, for them to have been brought back up to the surface. And we really have only spent 50 years looking for these remains, and begin to actually piece together our evolutionary story. So, let's go to Lake Turkana, which is one such lake basin in the very north of our country, Kenya. And if you look north here, there's a big river that flows into the lake that's been carrying sediment and preserving the remains of the animals that lived there. Fossil sites run up and down both lengths of that lake basin, which represents some 20,000 square miles. That's a huge job that we've got on our hands. Two million years ago at Lake Turkana, Homo erectus, one of our human ancestors, actually lived in this region. You can see some of the major fossil sites that we've been working in the north. But, essentially, two million years ago, Homo erectus, up in the far right corner, lived alongside three other species of human ancestor. And here is a skull of a Homo erectus, which I just pulled off the shelf there. (Laughter) But it is not to say that being a single species on planet Earth is the norm. In fact, if you go back in time, it is the norm that there are multiple species of hominids or of human ancestors that coexist at any one time. Where did these things come from? That's what we're still trying to find answers to, and it is important to realize that there is diversity in all different species, and our ancestors are no exception. Here's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from Lake Turkana. But I was very lucky to have been brought up in Kenya, essentially accompanying my parents to Lake Turkana in search of human remains. And we were able to dig up, when we got old enough, fossils such as this, a slender-snouted crocodile. And we dug up giant tortoises, and elephants and things like that. But when I was 12, as I was in this picture, a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side, when they found essentially the skeleton of this Homo erectus. I could relate to this Homo erectus skeleton very well, because I was the same age that he was when he died. And I imagined him to be tall, dark-skinned. His brothers certainly were able to run long distances chasing prey, probably sweating heavily as they did so. He was very able to use stones effectively as tools. And this individual himself, this one that I'm holding up here, actually had a bad back. He'd probably had an injury as a child. He had a scoliosis and therefore must have been looked after quite carefully by other female, and probably much smaller, members of his family group, to have got to where he did in life, age 12. Unfortunately for him, he fell into a swamp and couldn't get out. Essentially, his bones were rapidly buried and beautifully preserved. And he remained there until 1.6 million years later, when this very famous fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles, recognized it as being hominid. It's actually this little piece up here on the top. Well, an excavation was begun immediately, and more and more little bits of skull started to be extracted from the sediment. And what was so fun about it was this: the skull pieces got closer and closer to the roots of the tree, and fairly recently the tree had grown up, but it had found that the skull had captured nice water in the hillside, and so it had decided to grow its roots in and around this, holding it in place and preventing it from washing away down the slope. We began to find limb bones; we found finger bones, the bones of the pelvis, vertebrae, ribs, the collar bones, things that had never, ever been seen before in Homo erectus. It was truly exciting. He had a body very similar to our own, and he was on the threshold of becoming human. Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia. So, Homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave Africa and begin its spread across the globe. Some exciting finds, again, as I mentioned, from Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. But also, surprising finds recently announced from the Island of Flores in Indonesia, where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated, and have become dwarfed, and they're only about a meter in height. But they lived only 18,000 years ago, and that is truly extraordinary to think about. Just to put this in terms of generations, because people do find it hard to think of time, Homo erectus left Africa 90,000 generations ago. We evolved essentially from an African stock. Again, at about 200,000 years as a fully-fledged us. And we only left Africa about 70,000 years ago. And until 30,000 years ago, at least three upright-walking apes shared the planet Earth. The question now is, well, who are we? We're certainly a polluting, wasteful, aggressive species, with a few nice things thrown in, perhaps. (Laughter) For the most part, we're not particularly pleasant at all. We have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors. Is this a good evolutionary adaptation, or is it going to lead us to being the shortest-lived hominid species on planet Earth? And what is it that really makes us us? I think it's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness. From very primitive beginnings, with a very crude tool kit of stones, we now have a very advanced tool kit, and our tool use has really reached unprecedented levels: we've got buggies to Mars; we've mapped the human genome; and recently even created synthetic life, thanks to Craig Venter. And we've also managed to communicate with people all over the world, from extraordinary places. Even from within an excavation in northern Kenya, we can talk to people about what we're doing. As Al Gore so clearly has reminded us, we have reached extraordinary numbers of people on this planet. Human ancestors really only survive on planet Earth, if you look at the fossil record, for about, on average, a million years at a time. We've only been around for the past 200,000 years as a species, yet we've reached a population of more than six and a half billion people. And last year, our population grew by 80 million. I mean, these are extraordinary numbers. You can see here, again, taken from Al Gore's book. But what's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth. We have to control our numbers, and I think this is as important as anything else that's being done in the world today. But we have to control our numbers, because we can't really hold it together as a species. My father so appropriately put it, that "We are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species." Can we hold it together? It's important to remember that we all evolved in Africa. We all have an African origin. We have a common past and we share a common future. Evolutionarily speaking, we're just a blip. We're sitting on the edge of a precipice, and we have the tools and the technology at our hands to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together today. We could tell every single human being out there, if we really wanted to. But will we do that, or will we just let nature take its course? Well, to end on a very positive note, I think evolutionarily speaking, this is probably a fairly good thing, in the end. I'll leave it at that, thank you very much. (Applause)

The web as art

Jonathan Harris

{0: 'Jonathan Harris'}

{0: ['artist', 'storyteller', 'internet anthropologist']}

{0: "Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world's expression -- and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet."}

2007-12-12

2008-07-24

TED2007

en

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

['art', 'culture', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'happiness', 'software', 'storytelling', 'web']

{144: "The Web's secret stories", 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 14: 'Software (as) art', 2160: 'Why you should care about whale poo', 29159: 'Inside the killer whale matriarchy', 2765: 'Why do whales sing?'}

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

At the EG conference in December 2007, artist Jonathan Harris discusses his latest projects, which involve collecting stories: his own, strangers', and stories collected from the Internet, including his amazing "We Feel Fine."

So I'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways. This is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life. You might enjoy the awkwardly tight, cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons. Anyway, it was a time when I was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories. So this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings I ever made. And recently I've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality — so, real stories. And specifically, I'm interested in collecting my own stories, stories from the Internet, and then recently, stories from life, which is kind of a new area of work that I've been doing recently. So I'll be talking about each of those today. So, first of all, my own stories. These are two of my sketchbooks. I have many of these books, and I've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years. They accompany me wherever I go in my life, and I fill them with all sorts of things, records of my lived experience: so watercolor paintings, drawings of what I see, dead flowers, dead insects, pasted ticket stubs, rusting coins, business cards, writings. And in these books, you can find these short, little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that I meet. And, you know, after keeping these books for a number of years, I started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts, but also the artifacts of other people. So, I started collecting found objects. This is a photograph I found lying in a gutter in New York City about 10 years ago. On the front, you can see the tattered black-and-white photo of a woman's face, and on the back it says, "To Judy, the girl with the Bill Bailey voice. Have fun in whatever you do." And I really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody's life. As opposed to knowing the whole story, just knowing a little bit of the story, and then letting your own mind fill in the rest. And that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work I'll be showing later today. So, around this time I was studying computer science at Princeton University, and I noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts, not just from street corners, but also from the Internet. And that suddenly, people, en masse, were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives. Blog posts, photographs, thoughts, feelings, opinions, all of these things were being expressed by people online, and leaving behind trails. So, I started to write computer programs that study very, very large sets of these online footprints. One such project is about a year and a half old. It's called "We Feel Fine." This is a project that scans the world's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes, searching for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling." And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author. So, their gender, their age, their geographic location and what the weather conditions were like when they wrote that sentence. It collects about 20,000 such sentences a day and it's been running for about a year and a half, having collected over 10 and a half million feelings now. This is, then, how they're presented. These dots here represent some of the English-speaking world's feelings from the last few hours, each dot being a single sentence stated by a single blogger. And the color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling inside, so the bright ones are happy, and the dark ones are sad. And the diameter of each dot corresponds to the length of the sentence inside. So the small ones are short, and the bigger ones are longer. "I feel fine with the body I'm in, there'll be no easy excuse for why I still feel uncomfortable being close to my boyfriend," from a twenty-two-year-old in Japan. "I got this on some trading locally, but really don't feel like screwing with wiring and crap." Also, some of the feelings contain photographs in the blog posts. And when that happens, these montage compositions are automatically created, which consist of the sentence and images being combined. And any of these can be opened up to reveal the sentence inside. "I feel good." "I feel rough now, and I probably gained 100,000 pounds, but it was worth it." "I love how they were able to preserve most in everything that makes you feel close to nature — butterflies, man-made forests, limestone caves and hey, even a huge python." So the next movement is called mobs. This provides a slightly more statistical look at things. This is showing the world's most common feelings overall right now, dominated by better, then bad, then good, then guilty, and so on. Weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent. So the sunny ones swirl around, the cloudy ones float along, the rainy ones fall down, and the snowy ones flutter to the ground. You can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside. Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map, giving you a sense of their geographic distribution. So I'll show you now some of my favorite montages from "We Feel Fine." These are the images that are automatically constructed. "I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe." (Laughter) "I've kissed numerous other boys and it hasn't felt good, the kisses felt messy and wrong, but kissing Lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual." "I can feel my cancer grow." "I feel pretty." "I feel skinny, but I'm not." "I'm 23, and a recovering meth and heroin addict, and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive." "I can't wait to see them racing for the first time at Daytona next month, because I feel the need for speed." (Laughter) "I feel sassy." "I feel so sexy in this new wig." As you can see, "We Feel Fine" collects very, very small-scale personal stories. Sometimes, stories as short as two or three words. So, really even challenging the notion of what can be considered a story. And recently, I've become interested in diving much more deeply into a single story. And that's led me to doing some work with the physical world, not with the Internet, and only using the Internet at the very last moment, as a presentation medium. So these are some newer projects that actually aren't even launched publicly yet. The first such one is called "The Whale Hunt." Last May, I spent nine days living up in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States, with a family of Inupiat Eskimos, documenting their annual spring whale hunt. This is the whaling camp here, we're about six miles from shore, camping on five and a half feet of thick, frozen pack ice. And that water that you see there is the open lead, and through that lead, bowhead whales migrate north each springtime. And the Eskimo community basically camps out on the edge of the ice here, waits for a whale to come close enough to attack. And when it does, it throws a harpoon at it, and then hauls the whale up under the ice, and cuts it up. And that would provide the community's food supply for a long time. So I went up there, and I lived with these guys out in their whaling camp here, and photographed the entire experience, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport in New York, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven and a half days later. I photographed that entire experience at five-minute intervals. So every five minutes, I took a photograph. When I was awake, with the camera around my neck. When I was sleeping, with a tripod and a timer. And then in moments of high adrenaline, like when something exciting was happening, I would up that photographic frequency to as many as 37 photographs in five minutes. So what this created was a photographic heartbeat that sped up and slowed down, more or less matching the changing pace of my own heartbeat. That was the first concept here. The second concept was to use this experience to think about the fundamental components of any story. What are the things that make up a story? So, stories have characters. Stories have concepts. Stories take place in a certain area. They have contexts. They have colors. What do they look like? They have time. When did it take place? Dates — when did it occur? And in the case of the whale hunt, also this idea of an excitement level. The thing about stories, though, in most of the existing mediums that we're accustomed to — things like novels, radio, photographs, movies, even lectures like this one — we're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position, some kind of omniscient, external body through whose eyes you see the story. We're very used to this. But if you think about real life, it's not like that at all. I mean, in real life, things are much more nuanced and complex, and there's all of these overlapping stories intersecting and touching each other. And so I thought it would be interesting to build a framework to surface those types of stories. So, in the case of "The Whale Hunt," how could we extract something like the story of Simeon and Crawford, involving the concepts of wildlife, tools and blood, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, dominated by the color red, happening around 10 a.m. on May 3, with an excitement level of high? So, how to extract this order of narrative from this larger story? I built a web interface for viewing "The Whale Hunt" that attempts to do just this. So these are all 3,214 pictures taken up there. This is my studio in Brooklyn. This is the Arctic Ocean, and the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. You can start to see some of the story here, told by color. So this red strip signifies the color of the wallpaper in the basement apartment where I was staying. And things go white as we move out onto the Arctic Ocean. Introduction of red down here, when whales are being cut up. You can see a timeline, showing you the exciting moments throughout the story. These are organized chronologically. Wheel provides a slightly more playful version of the same, so these are also all the photographs organized chronologically. And any of these can be clicked, and then the narrative is entered at that position. So here I am sleeping on the airplane heading up to Alaska. That's "Moby Dick." This is the food we ate. This is in the Patkotak's family living room in their house in Barrow. The boxed wine they served us. Cigarette break outside — I don't smoke. This is a really exciting sequence of me sleeping. This is out at whale camp, on the Arctic Ocean. This graph that I'm clicking down here is meant to be reminiscent of a medical heartbeat graph, showing the exciting moments of adrenaline. This is the ice starting to freeze over. The snow fence they built. And so what I'll show you now is the ability to pull out sub-stories. So, here you see the cast. These are all of the people in "The Whale Hunt" and the two whales that were killed down here. And we could do something as arbitrary as, say, extract the story of Rony, involving the concepts of blood and whales and tools, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, at Ahkivgaq camp, with the heartbeat level of fast. And now we've whittled down that whole story to just 29 matching photographs, and then we can enter the narrative at that position. And you can see Rony cutting up the whale here. These whales are about 40 feet long, and weighing over 40 tons. And they provide the food source for the community for much of the year. Skipping ahead a bit more here, this is Rony on the whale carcass. They use no chainsaws or anything; it's entirely just blades, and an incredibly efficient process. This is the guys on the rope, pulling open the carcass. This is the muktuk, or the blubber, all lined up for community distribution. It's baleen. Moving on. So what I'm going to tell you about next is a very new thing. It's not even a project yet. So, just yesterday, I flew in here from Singapore, and before that, I was spending two weeks in Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom nestled between Tibet and India. And I was doing a project there about happiness, interviewing a lot of local people. So Bhutan has this really wacky thing where they base most of their high-level governmental decisions around the concept of gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product, and they've been doing this since the '70s. And it leads to just a completely different value system. It's an incredibly non-materialistic culture, where people don't have a lot, but they're incredibly happy. So I went around and I talked to people about some of these ideas. So, I did a number of things. I asked people a number of set questions, and took a number of set photographs, and interviewed them with audio, and also took pictures. I would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and 10, which is kind of inherently absurd. And then when they answered, I would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold. So, you have some really happy person holding 10 balloons, and some really sad soul holding one balloon. But you know, even holding one balloon is like, kind of happy. (Laughter) And then I would ask them a number of questions like what was the happiest day in their life, what makes them happy. And then finally, I would ask them to make a wish. And when they made a wish, I would write their wish onto one of the balloons and take a picture of them holding it. So I'm going to show you now just a few brief snippets of some of the interviews that I did, some of the people I spoke with. This is an 11-year-old student. He was playing cops and robbers with his friends, running around town, and they all had plastic toy guns. His wish was to become a police officer. He was getting started early. Those were his hands. I took pictures of everybody's hands, because I think you can often tell a lot about somebody from how their hands look. I took a portrait of everybody, and asked everybody to make a funny face. A 17-year-old student. Her wish was to have been born a boy. She thinks that women have a pretty tough go of things in Bhutan, and it's a lot easier if you're a boy. A 28-year-old cell phone shop owner. If you knew what Paro looked like, you'd understand how amazing it is that there's a cell phone shop there. He wanted to help poor people. A 53-year-old farmer. She was chaffing wheat, and that pile of wheat behind her had taken her about a week to make. She wanted to keep farming until she dies. You can really start to see the stories told by the hands here. She was wearing this silver ring that had the word "love" engraved on it, and she'd found it in the road somewhere. A 16-year-old quarry worker. This guy was breaking rocks with a hammer in the hot sunlight, but he just wanted to spend his life as a farmer. A 21-year-old monk. He was very happy. He wanted to live a long life at the monastery. He had this amazing series of hairs growing out of a mole on the left side of his face, which I'm told is very good luck. He was kind of too shy to make a funny face. A 16-year-old student. She wanted to become an independent woman. I asked her about that, and she said she meant that she doesn't want to be married, because, in her opinion, when you get married in Bhutan as a woman, your chances to live an independent life kind of end, and so she had no interest in that. A 24-year-old truck driver. There are these terrifyingly huge Indian trucks that come careening around one-lane roads with two-lane traffic, with 3,000-foot drop-offs right next to the road, and he was driving one of these trucks. But all he wanted was to just live a comfortable life, like other people. A 24-year-old road sweeper. I caught her on her lunch break. She'd built a little fire to keep warm, right next to the road. Her wish was to marry someone with a car. She wanted a change in her life. She lives in a little worker's camp right next to the road, and she wanted a different lot on things. An 81-year-old itinerant farmer. I saw this guy on the side of the road, and he actually doesn't have a home. He travels from farm to farm each day trying to find work, and then he tries to sleep at whatever farm he gets work at. So his wish was to come with me, so that he had somewhere to live. He had this amazing knife that he pulled out of his gho and started brandishing when I asked him to make a funny face. It was all good-natured. A 10-year-old. He wanted to join a school and learn to read, but his parents didn't have enough money to send him to school. He was eating this orange, sugary candy that he kept dipping his fingers into, and since there was so much saliva on his hands, this orange paste started to form on his palms. (Laughter) A 37-year-old road worker. One of the more touchy political subjects in Bhutan is the use of Indian cheap labor that they import from India to build the roads, and then they send these people home once the roads are built. So these guys were in a worker's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway. His wish was to make some money and open a store. A 75-year-old farmer. She was selling oranges on the side of the road. I asked her about her wish, and she said, "You know, maybe I'll live, maybe I'll die, but I don't have a wish." She was chewing betel nut, which caused her teeth over the years to turn very red. Finally, this is a 26-year-old nun I spoke to. Her wish was to make a pilgrimage to Tibet. I asked her how long she planned to live in the nunnery and she said, "Well, you know, of course, it's impermanent, but my plan is to live here until I'm 30, and then enter a hermitage." And I said, "You mean, like a cave?" And she said, "Yeah, like a cave." And I said, "Wow, and how long will you live in the cave?" And she said, "Well, you know, I think I'd kind of like to live my whole life in the cave." I just thought that was amazing. I mean, she spoke in a way — with amazing English, and amazing humor, and amazing laughter — that made her seem like somebody I could have bumped into on the streets of New York, or in Vermont, where I'm from. But here she had been living in a nunnery for the last seven years. I asked her a little bit more about the cave and what she planned would happen once she went there, you know. What if she saw the truth after just one year, what would she do for the next 35 years in her life? And this is what she said. Woman: I think I'm going to stay for 35. Maybe — maybe I'll die. Jonathan Harris: Maybe you'll die? Woman: Yes. JH: 10 years? Woman: Yes, yes. JH: 10 years, that's a long time. Woman: Yes, not maybe one, 10 years, maybe I can die within one year, or something like that. JH: Are you hoping to? Woman: Ah, because you know, it's impermanent. JH: Yeah, but — yeah, OK. Do you hope — would you prefer to live in the cave for 40 years, or to live for one year? Woman: But I prefer for maybe 40 to 50. JH: 40 to 50? Yeah. Woman: Yes. From then, I'm going to the heaven. JH: Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. Woman: Thank you. JH: I hope it's everything that you hope it will be. So thank you again, so much. Woman: You're most welcome. JH: So if you caught that, she said she hoped to die when she was around 40. That was enough life for her. So, the last thing we did, very quickly, is I took all those wish balloons — there were 117 interviews, 117 wishes — and I brought them up to a place called Dochula, which is a mountain pass in Bhutan, at 10,300 feet, one of the more sacred places in Bhutan. And up there, there are thousands of prayer flags that people have spread out over the years. And we re-inflated all of the balloons, put them up on a string, and hung them up there among the prayer flags. And they're actually still flying up there today. So if any of you have any Bhutan travel plans in the near future, you can go check these out. Here are some images from that. We said a Buddhist prayer so that all these wishes could come true. You can start to see some familiar balloons here. "To make some money and to open a store" was the Indian road worker. Thanks very much. (Applause)

A tour of modern architecture

Reed Kroloff

{0: 'Reed Kroloff'}

{0: ['architecture critic']}

{0: 'With an outspoken approach to the problems of rebuilding cites and a fearless eye for design, Reed Kroloff is helping to change the urban landscape of cities from New York to New Orleans.'}

2003-02-02

2008-07-28

TED2003

en

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

['architecture', 'art', 'business', 'design', 'humor']

{49: "Behind the design of Seattle's library", 8: 'A memorial at Ground Zero', 31: 'How architecture can connect us', 750: 'Building a theater that remakes itself', 13: 'A master architect asks, Now what?', 589: '17 words of architectural inspiration'}

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

Reed Kroloff gives us a new lens for judging new architecture: is it modern, or is it romantic? Look for glorious images from two leading practices -- and a blistering critique of the 9/11 planning process.

To be new at TED — it's like being the last high-school virgin. (Laughter) You know that all of the cool people are — they're doing it. And you're on the outside, you're at home. You're like the Raspyni Brothers, where you've got your balls in cold water. And — (Laughter) — you just play with your fingers all day. And then you get invited. And you're on the inside, and it's everything you hoped it would be. It's exciting and there's music playing all of the time and then suddenly it's over. And it's only taken five minutes. And you want to go back and do it again. But I really appreciate being here. And thank you, Chris, and also, thank you, Deborah Patton, for making this possible. So anyway, today we'll talk about architecture a little bit, within the subject of creation and optimism. And if you put creation and optimism together, you've got two choices that you can talk about. You can talk about creationism — which I think wouldn't go down well with this audience, at least not from a view where you were a proponent of it — or you can talk about optimisations, spelled the British way, with an S, instead of a Z. And I think that's what I'd like to talk about today. But any kind of conversation about architecture — which is, in fact, what you were just talking about, what was going on here, setting up TED, small-scale architecture — at the present time can't really happen without a conversation about this, the World Trade Center, and what's been going on there, what it means to us. Because if architecture is what I believe it to be, which is the built form of our cultural ambitions, what do you do when presented with an opportunity to rectify a situation that represents somebody else's cultural ambitions relative to us? And our own opportunity to make something new there? This has been a really galvanizing issue for a long time. I think that the World Trade Center in, rather an unfortunate way, brought architecture into focus in a way that I don't think people had thought of in a long time, and made it a subject for common conversation. I don't remember, in my 20-year career of practicing and writing about architecture, a time when five people sat me down at a table and asked me very serious questions about zoning, fire exiting, safety concerns and whether carpet burns. These are just not things we talked about very often. And yet, now, it's talked about all the time. At the point where you can weaponize your buildings, you have to suddenly think about architecture in a very different way. And so now we're going to think about architecture in a very different way, we're going to think about it like this. How many of you saw USA Today, today? There it is. Looks like that. There's the World Trade Center site, on the front cover. They've made a selection. They've chosen a project by Daniel Libeskind, the enfant terrible of the moment of architecture. Child-prodigy piano player, he started on the squeezebox, and moved to a little more serious issue, a bigger instrument, and now to an even larger instrument, upon which to work his particular brand of deconstructivist magic, as you see here. He was one of six people who were invited to participate in this competition, after six previous firms struck out with things that were so stupid and banal that even the city of New York was forced to go, "Oh, I'm really sorry, we screwed up." Right. Can we do this again from the top, except use some people with a vague hint of talent, instead of just six utter boobs like we brought in last time, real estate hacks of the kind who usually plan our cities. Let's bring in some real architects for a change. And so we got this, or we had a choice of that. Oh, stop clapping. (Laughter) It's too late. That is gone. This was a scheme by a team called THINK, a New York-based team, and then there was that one, which was the Libeskind scheme. This one, this is going to be the new World Trade Center: a giant hole in the ground with big buildings falling into it. Now, I don't know what you think, but I think this is a pretty stupid decision, because what you've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever. But that's what we're going to do. But I want you to think about these things in terms of a kind of ongoing struggle that American architecture represents, and that these two things talk about very specifically. And that is the wild divergence in how we choose our architects, in trying to decide whether we want architecture from the kind of technocratic solution to everything — that there is a large, technical answer that can solve all problems, be they social, be they physical, be they chemical — or something that's more of a romantic solution. Now, I don't mean romantic as in, this is a nice place to take someone on a date. I mean romantic in the sense of, there are things larger and grander than us. So, in the American tradition, the difference between the technocratic and the romantic, would be the difference between Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian grids spreading across the United States, that gives us basically the whole shape of every western state in the United States, as a really, truly, technocratic solution, a bowing to the — in Jefferson's time — current, popular philosophy of rationalism. Or the way we went to describe that later: manifest destiny. Now, which would you rather be? A grid, or manifest destiny? Manifest destiny. (Laughter) It's a big deal. It sounds big, it sounds important, it sounds solid. It sounds American. Ballsy, serious, male. And that kind of fight has gone on back and forth in architecture all the time. I mean, it goes on in our private lives, too, every single day. We all want to go out and buy an Audi TT, don't we? Everyone here must own one, or at least they craved one the moment they saw one. And then they hopped in it, turned the little electronic key, rather than the real key, zipped home on their new superhighway, and drove straight into a garage that looks like a Tudor castle. (Laughter) Why? Why? Why do you want to do that? Why do we all want to do that? I even owned a Tudor thing once myself. (Laughter) It's in our nature to go ricocheting back and forth between this technocratic solution and a larger, sort of more romantic image of where we are. So we're going to go straight into this. Can I have the lights off for a moment? I'm going to talk about two architects very, very briefly that represent the current split, architecturally, between these two traditions of a technocratic or technological solution and a romantic solution. And these are two of the top architectural practices in the United States today. One very young, one a little more mature. This is the work of a firm called SHoP, and what you're seeing here, is their isometric drawings of what will be a large-scale camera obscura in a public park. Does everybody know what a camera obscura is? Yeah, it's one of those giant camera lenses that takes a picture of the outside world — it's sort of a little movie, without any moving parts — and projects it on a page, and you can see the world outside you as you walk around it. This is just the outline of it, and you can see, does it look like a regular building? No. It's actually non-orthogonal: it's not up and down, square, rectangular, anything like that, that you'd see in a normal shape of a building. The computer revolution, the technocratic, technological revolution, has allowed us to jettison normal-shaped buildings, traditionally shaped buildings, in favor of non-orthogonal buildings such as this. What's interesting about it is not the shape. What's interesting about it is how it's made. How it's made. A brand-new way to put buildings together, something called mass customization. No, it is not an oxymoron. What makes the building expensive, in the traditional sense, is making individual parts custom, that you can't do over and over again. That's why we all live in developer houses. They all want to save money by building the same thing 500 times. That's because it's cheaper. Mass customization works by an architect feeding into a computer, a program that says, manufacture these parts. The computer then talks to a machine — a computer-operated machine, a cad-cam machine — that can make a zillion different changes, at a moment's notice, because the computer is just a machine. It doesn't care. It's manufacturing the parts. It doesn't see any excess cost. It doesn't spend any extra time. It's not a laborer — it's simply an electronic lathe, so the parts can all be cut at the same time. Meanwhile, instead of sending someone working drawings, which are those huge sets of blueprints that you've seen your whole life, what the architect can do is send a set of assembly instructions, like you used to get when you were a child, when you bought little models that said, "Bolt A to B, and C to D." And so what the builder will get is every single individual part that has been custom manufactured off-site and delivered on a truck to the site, to that builder, and a set of these instruction manuals. Just simple "Bolt A to B" and they will be able to put them together. Here's the little drawing that tells them how that works — and that's what will happen in the end. You're underneath it, looking up into the lens of the camera obscura. Lest you think this is all fiction, lest you think this is all fantasy, or romance, these same architects were asked to produce something for the central courtyard of PS1, which is a museum in Brooklyn, New York, as part of their young architects summer series. And they said, well, it's summer, what do you do? In the summer, you go to the beach. And when you go to the beach, what do you get? You get sand dunes. So let's make architectural sand dunes and a beach cabana. So they went out and they modeled a computer model of a sand dune. They took photographs, they fed the photographs into their computer program, and that computer program shaped a sand dune and then took that sand dune shape and turned it into — at their instructions, using standard software with slight modifications — a set of instructions for pieces of wood. And those are the pieces of wood. Those are the instructions. These are the pieces, and here's a little of that blown up. What you can see is there's about six different colors, and each color represents a type of wood to be cut, a piece of wood to be cut. All of which were delivered by flat bed, on a truck, and hand assembled in 48 hours by a team of eight people, only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. Only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. And here comes dune-scape, coming up out of the courtyard, and there it is fully built. There are only 16 different pieces of wood, only 16 different assembly parts here. Looks like a beautiful piano sounding board on the inside. It has its own built-in swimming pool, very, very cool. It's a great place for parties — it was, it was only up for six weeks. It's got little dressing rooms and cabanas, where lots of interesting things went on, all summer long. Now, lest you think that this is only for the light at heart, or just temporary installations, this is the same firm working at the World Trade Center, replacing the bridge that used to go across West Street, that very important pedestrian connection between the city of New York and the redevelopment of the West Side. They were asked to design, replace that bridge in six weeks, building it, including all of the parts, manufactured. And they were able to do it. That was their design, using that same computer modeling system and only five or six really different kinds of parts, a couple of struts, like this, some exterior cladding material and a very simple framing system that was all manufactured off-site and delivered by truck. They were able to create that. They were able to create something wonderful. They're now building a 16-story building on the side of New York, using the same technology. Here we're going to walk across the bridge at night. It's self-lit, you don't need any overhead lighting, so the neighbors don't complain about metal-halide lighting in their face. Here it is going across. And there, down the other side, and you get the same kind of grandeur. Now, let me show you, quickly, the opposite, if I may. Woo, pretty, huh. This is the other side of the coin. This is the work of David Rockwell from New York City, whose work you can see out here today. The current king of the romantics, who approaches his work in a very different fashion. It's not to create a technological solution, it's to seduce you into something that you can do, into something that will please you, something that will lift your spirits, something that will make you feel as if are in another world — such as his Nobu restaurant in New York, which is supposed to take you from the clutter of New York City to the simplicity of Japan and the elegance of Japanese tradition. "When it's all said and done, it's got to look like seaweed," said the owner. Or his restaurant, Pod, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I want you to know the room you're looking at is stark white. Every single surface of this restaurant is white. The reason it has so much color is that it changes using lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about transforming. Watch this — I'm not touching any buttons, ladies and gentlemen. This is happening by itself. It transforms through the magic of lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about touch. Rosa Mexicano restaurant, where he transports us to the shores of Acapulco, up on the Upper West Side, with this wall of cliff divers who — there you go, like that. Let's see it one more time. Okay, just to make sure that you've enjoyed it. And finally, it's about comfort, it's about making you feel good in places that you wouldn't have felt good before. It's about bringing nature to the inside. In the Guardian Tower of New York, converted to a W Union Square — I'm sorry I'm rushing — where we had to bring in the best horticulturists in the world to make sure that the interior of this dragged the garden space of the court garden of the Union Square into the building itself. It's about stimulation. This is a wine-buying experience simplified by color and taste. Fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big and sweet wines, all explained to you by color and texture on the wall. And finally, it's about entertainment, as in his headquarters for the Cirque du Soleil, Orlando, Florida, where you're asked to enter the Greek theater, look under the tent and join the magic world of Cirque du Soleil. And I think I'll probably leave it at that. Thank you very much.

The next 5,000 days of the web

Kevin Kelly

{0: 'Kevin Kelly'}

{0: ['digital visionary']}

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

2007-12-12

2008-07-28

EG 2007

en

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

['communication', 'complexity', 'future', 'technology', 'web', 'Best of the Web']

{19: 'How technology evolves', 362: 'The Web as a city', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 2061: 'A Magna Carta for the web', 1581: 'Online video -- annotated, remixed and popped', 783: 'Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?'}

https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web/

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

The Internet, the Web as we know it, the kind of Web — the things we're all talking about — is already less than 5,000 days old. So all of the things that we've seen come about, starting, say, with satellite images of the whole Earth, which we couldn't even imagine happening before, all these things rolling into our lives, just this abundance of things that are right before us, sitting in front of our laptop, or our desktop. This kind of cornucopia of stuff just coming and never ending is amazing, and we're not amazed. It's really amazing that all this stuff is here. (Laughter) It's in 5,000 days, all this stuff has come. And I know that 10 years ago, if I had told you that this was all coming, you would have said that that's impossible. There's simply no economic model that that would be possible. And if I told you it was all coming for free, you would say, this is simply — you're dreaming. You're a Californian utopian. You're a wild-eyed optimist. And yet it's here. The other thing that we know about it was that 10 years ago, as I looked at what even Wired was talking about, we thought it was going to be TV, but better. That was the model. That was what everybody was suggesting was going to be coming. And it turns out that that's not what it was. First of all, it was impossible, and it's not what it was. And so one of the things that I think we're learning — if you think about, like, Wikipedia, it's something that was simply impossible. It's impossible in theory, but possible in practice. And if you take all these things that are impossible, I think one of the things that we're learning from this era, from this last decade, is that we have to get good at believing in the impossible, because we're unprepared for it. So, I'm curious about what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days. But if that's happened in the last 5,000 days, what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days? So, I have a kind of a simple story, and it suggests that what we want to think about is this thing that we're making, this thing that has happened in 5,000 days — that's all these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers — basically what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. If there is only one machine, and our little handhelds and devices are actually just little windows into those machines, but that we're basically constructing a single, global machine. And so I began to think about that. And it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine that we've ever made. It has not crashed; it's running uninterrupted. And there's almost no other machine that we've ever made that runs the number of hours, the number of days. 5,000 days without interruption — that's just unbelievable. And of course, the Internet is longer than just 5,000 days; the Web is only 5,000 days. So, I was trying to basically make measurements. What are the dimensions of this machine? And I started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are all around the globe on all the computers. And there is a 100 billion clicks per day. And there's 55 trillion links between all the Web pages of the world. And so I began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions, and I made a quick list. Was it Chris Jordan, the photographer, talking about numbers being so large that they're meaningless? Well, here's a list of them. They're hard to tell, but there's one billion PC chips on the Internet, if you count all the chips in all the computers on the Internet. There's two million emails per second. So it's a very big number. It's just a huge machine, and it uses five percent of the global electricity on the planet. So here's the specifications, just as if you were to make up a spec sheet for it: 170 quadrillion transistors, 55 trillion links, emails running at two megahertz itself, 31 kilohertz text messaging, 246 exabyte storage. That's a big disk. That's a lot of storage, memory. Nine exabyte RAM. And the total traffic on this is running at seven terabytes per second. Brewster was saying the Library of Congress is about twenty terabytes. So every second, half of the Library of Congress is swooshing around in this machine. It's a big machine. So I did something else. I figured out 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain. A quadrillion transistors is almost the same as the number of neurons in your brain. So to a first approximation, we have these things — twenty petahertz synapse firings. Of course, the memory is really huge. But to a first approximation, the size of this machine is the size — and its complexity, kind of — to your brain. Because in fact, that's how your brain works — in kind of the same way that the Web works. However, your brain isn't doubling every two years. So if we say this machine right now that we've made is about one HB, one human brain, if we look at the rate that this is increasing, 30 years from now, there'll be six billion HBs. So by the year 2040, the total processing of this machine will exceed a total processing power of humanity, in raw bits and stuff. And this is, I think, where Ray Kurzweil and others get this little chart saying that we're going to cross. So, what about that? Well, here's a couple of things. I have three kind of general things I would like to say, three consequences of this. First, that basically what this machine is doing is embodying. We're giving it a body. And that's what we're going to do in the next 5,000 days — we're going to give this machine a body. And the second thing is, we're going to restructure its architecture. And thirdly, we're going to become completely codependent upon it. So let me go through those three things. First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think they're all separate devices, but in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into that one machine. The second thing is that — some people call this the cloud, and you're kind of touching the cloud with this. And so in some ways, all you really need is a cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn't have any storage. It's wireless. It's always connected. There's many things about it. It becomes very simple, and basically what you're doing is you're just touching the machine, you're touching the cloud and you're going to compute that way. So the machine is computing. And in some ways, it's sort of back to the kind of old idea of centralized computing. But everything, all the cameras, and the microphones, and the sensors in cars and everything is connected to this machine. And everything will go through the Web. And we're seeing that already with, say, phones. Right now, phones don't go through the Web, but they are beginning to, and they will. And if you imagine what, say, just as an example, what Google Labs has in terms of experiments with Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah — all these things are going to become Web based. They're going through the machine. And I am suggesting that every bit will be owned by the Web. Right now, it's not. If you do spreadsheets and things at work, a Word document, they aren't on the Web, but they are going to be. They're going to be part of this machine. They're going to speak the Web language. They're going to talk to the machine. The Web, in some sense, is kind of like a black hole that's sucking up everything into it. And so every thing will be part of the Web. So every item, every artifact that we make, will have embedded in it some little sliver of Web-ness and connection, and it will be part of this machine, so that our environment — kind of in that ubiquitous computing sense — our environment becomes the Web. Everything is connected. Now, with RFIDs and other things — whatever technology it is, it doesn't really matter. The point is that everything will have embedded in it some sensor connecting it to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels, because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is the embedded intelligence and electronics in it, and not the materials. A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative, virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms. But in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two, where we embed the information, and the digital nature of things into the material world. That's what we're looking forward to. That is where we're going — this union, this convergence of the atomic and the digital. And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there's many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other. So that the laws of media, such as the fact that copies have no value, the value's in the uncopiable things, the immediacy, the authentication, the personalization. The media wants to be liquid. The reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are "free" as in "beer," but "free" as in "freedom." And the network effects rule, meaning that the more you have, the more you get. The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we're going to see. Attention is the currency. So those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media. And the other thing about this embodiment is that there's kind of what I call the McLuhan reversal. McLuhan was saying, "Machines are the extensions of the human senses." And I'm saying, "Humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine," in a certain sense. So we have a trillion eyes, and ears, and touches, through all our digital photographs and cameras. And we see that in things like Flickr, or Photosynth, this program from Microsoft that will allow you to assemble a view of a touristy place from the thousands of tourist snapshots of it. In a certain sense, the machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras. Now, the second thing that I want to talk about was this idea of restructuring, that what the Web is doing is restructuring. And I have to warn you, that what we'll talk about is — I'm going to give my explanation of a term you're hearing, which is a "semantic Web." So first of all, the first stage that we've seen of the Internet was that it was going to link computers. And that's what we called the Net; that was the Internet of nets. And we saw that, where you have all the computers of the world. And if you remember, it was a kind of green screen with cursors, and there was really not much to do, and if you wanted to connect it, you connected it from one computer to another computer. And what you had to do was — if you wanted to participate in this, you had to share packets of information. So you were forwarding on. You didn't have control. It wasn't like a telephone system where you had control of a line: you had to share packets. The second stage that we're in now is the idea of linking pages. So in the old one, if I wanted to go on to an airline Web page, I went from my computer, to an FTP site, to another airline computer. Now we have pages — the unit has been resolved into pages, so one page links to another page. And if I want to go in to book a flight, I go into the airline's flight page, the website of the airline, and I'm linking to that page. And what we're sharing were links, so you had to be kind of open with links. You couldn't deny — if someone wanted to link to you, you couldn't stop them. You had to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody. So that's what we were doing. We're now entering to the third stage, which is what I'm talking about, and that is where we link the data. So, I don't know what the name of this thing is. I'm calling it the one machine. But we're linking data. So we're going from machine to machine, from page to page, and now data to data. So the difference is, is that rather than linking from page to page, we're actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea, rather than to the other page. So every idea is basically being supported — or every item, or every noun — is being supported by the entire Web. It's being resolved at the level of items, or ideas, or words, if you want. So besides physically coming out again into this idea that it's not just virtual, it's actually going out to things. So something will resolve down to the information about a particular person, so every person will have a unique ID. Every person, every item will have a something that will be very specific, and will link to a specific representation of that idea or item. So now, in this new one, when I link to it, I would link to my particular flight, my particular seat. And so, giving an example of this thing, I live in Pacifica, rather than — right now Pacifica is just sort of a name on the Web somewhere. The Web doesn't know that that is actually a town, and that it's a specific town that I live in, but that's what we're going to be talking about. It's going to link directly to — it will know, the Web will be able to read itself and know that that actually is a place, and that whenever it sees that word, "Pacifica," it knows that it actually has a place, latitude, longitude, a certain population. So here are some of the technical terms, all three-letter things, that you'll see a lot more of. All these things are about enabling this idea of linking to the data. So I'll give you one kind of an example. There's like a billion social sites on the Web. Each time you go into there, you have to tell it again who you are and all your friends are. Why should you be doing that? You should just do that once, and it should know who all your friends are. So that's what you want, is all your friends are identified, and you should just carry these relationships around. All this data about you should just be conveyed, and you should do it once and that's all that should happen. And you should have all the networks of all the relationships between those pieces of data. That's what we're moving into — where it sort of knows these things down to that level. A semantic Web, Web 3.0, giant global graph — we're kind of trying out what we want to call this thing. But what's it's doing is sharing data. So you have to be open to having your data shared, which is a much bigger step than just sharing your Web page, or your computer. And all these things that are going to be on this are not just pages, they are things. Everything we've described, every artifact or place, will be a specific representation, will have a specific character that can be linked to directly. So we have this database of things. And so there's actually a fourth thing that we have not get to, that we won't see in the next 10 years, or 5,000 days, but I think that's where we're going to. And as the Internet of things — where I'm linking directly to the particular things of my seat on the plane — that that physical thing becomes part of the Web. And so we are in the middle of this thing that's completely linked, down to every object in the little sliver of a connection that it has. So, the last thing I want to talk about is this idea that we're going to be codependent. It's always going to be there, and the closer it is, the better. If you allow Google to, it will tell you your search history. And I found out by looking at it that I search most at 11 o'clock in the morning. So I am open, and being transparent to that. And I think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want to have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent. Google. I can't remember my phone number, I'll just ask Google. We're so dependent on this that I have now gotten to the point where I don't even try to remember things — I'll just Google it. It's easier to do that. And we kind of object at first, saying, "Oh, that's awful." But if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology, called the alphabet, and writing, we're totally dependent on it, and it's transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing. And so in the same way, we're going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine being there. And what is happening with this is some kind of AI, but it's not the AI in conscious AI, as being an expert, Larry Page told me that that's what they're trying to do, and that's what they're trying to do. But when six billion humans are Googling, who's searching who? It goes both ways. So we are the Web, that's what this thing is. We are going to be the machine. So the next 5,000 days, it's not going to be the Web and only better. Just like it wasn't TV and only better. The next 5,000 days, it's not just going to be the Web but only better — it's going to be something different. And I think it's going to be smarter. It'll have an intelligence in there, that's not, again, conscious. But it'll anticipate what we're doing, in a good sense. Secondly, it's become much more personalized. It will know us, and that's good. And again, the price of that will be transparency. And thirdly, it's going to become more ubiquitous in terms of filling your entire environment, and we will be in the middle of it. And all these devices will be portals into that. So the single idea that I wanted to leave with you is that we have to begin to think about this as not just "the Web, only better," but a new kind of stage in this development. It looks more global. If you take this whole thing, it is a very big machine, very reliable machine, more reliable than its parts. But we can also think about it as kind of a large organism. So we might respond to it more as if this was a whole system, more as if this wasn't a large organism that we are going to be interacting with. It's a "One." And I don't know what else to call it, than the One. We'll have a better word for it. But there's a unity of some sort that's starting to emerge. And again, I don't want to talk about consciousness, I want to talk about it just as if it was a little bacteria, or a volvox, which is what that organism is. So, to do, action, take-away. So, here's what I would say: there's only one machine, and the Web is its OS. All screens look into the One. No bits will live outside the Web. To share is to gain. Let the One read it. It's going to be machine-readable. You want to make something that the machine can read. And the One is us. We are in the One. I appreciate your time. (Applause)

The math and magic of origami

Robert Lang

{0: 'Robert Lang'}

{0: ['origamist']}

{0: 'Robert Lang merges mathematics with aesthetics to fold elegant modern origami. His scientific approach helps him make folds once thought impossible -- and has secured his place as one of the first great Western masters of the art. '}

2008-02-02

2008-07-30

TED2008

en

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

['art', 'design', 'engineering', 'math', 'origami', 'space']

{162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 267: 'Moving sculpture', 198: 'The fractals at the heart of African designs', 1519: 'Building unimaginable shapes', 23722: 'How folding paper can get you to the moon', 1431: 'How to use a paper towel'}

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

Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami -- using math and engineering principles to fold mind-blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and, sometimes, very useful.

My talk is "Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes." And you would think that should have nothing to do with one another, but I hope by the end of these 18 minutes, you'll see a little bit of a relation. It ties to origami. So let me start. What is origami? Most people think they know what origami is. It's this: flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing. And that is what origami used to be. But it's become something else. It's become an art form, a form of sculpture. The common theme — what makes it origami — is folding is how we create the form. You know, it's very old. This is a plate from 1797. It shows these women playing with these toys. If you look close, it's this shape, called a crane. Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane. So this art has been around for hundreds of years, and you would think something that's been around that long — so restrictive, folding only — everything that could be done has been done a long time ago. And that might have been the case. But in the twentieth century, a Japanese folder named Yoshizawa came along, and he created tens of thousands of new designs. But even more importantly, he created a language, a way we could communicate, a code of dots, dashes and arrows. Harkening back to Susan Blackmore's talk, we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection, and we know where that leads. And where it has led in origami is to things like this. This is an origami figure — one sheet, no cuts, folding only, hundreds of folds. This, too, is origami, and this shows where we've gone in the modern world. Naturalism. Detail. You can get horns, antlers — even, if you look close, cloven hooves. And it raises a question: what changed? And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math. That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws. And that leads to a very powerful tool. The secret to productivity in so many fields — and in origami — is letting dead people do your work for you. (Laughter) Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions. And I want to tell you how we did that in origami. Origami revolves around crease patterns. The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure. And you can't just draw them arbitrarily. They have to obey four simple laws. And they're very simple, easy to understand. The first law is two-colorability. You can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting. The directions of the folds at any vertex — the number of mountain folds, the number of valley folds — always differs by two. Two more or two less. Nothing else. If you look at the angles around the fold, you find that if you number the angles in a circle, all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line, all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line. And if you look at how the layers stack, you'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets, a sheet can never penetrate a fold. So that's four simple laws. That's all you need in origami. All of origami comes from that. And you'd think, "Can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity?" But indeed, the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin, and yet they govern all of chemistry, all of life, all of history. If we obey these laws, we can do amazing things. So in origami, to obey these laws, we can take simple patterns — like this repeating pattern of folds, called textures — and by itself it's nothing. But if we follow the laws of origami, we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very, very simple, but when we put it together, we get something a little different. This fish, 400 scales — again, it is one uncut square, only folding. And if you don't want to fold 400 scales, you can back off and just do a few things, and add plates to the back of a turtle, or toes. Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag, with 13 stripes. And if you want to go really crazy, 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake. And this guy's on display downstairs, so take a look if you get a chance. The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures. And I can put it in this simple equation. We take an idea, combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure. (Laughter) What matters is what we mean by those symbols. And you might say, "Can you really be that specific? I mean, a stag beetle — it's got two points for jaws, it's got antennae. Can you be that specific in the detail?" And yeah, you really can. So how do we do that? Well, we break it down into a few smaller steps. So let me stretch out that equation. I start with my idea. I abstract it. What's the most abstract form? It's a stick figure. And from that stick figure, I somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject, a flap for every leg. And then once I have that folded shape that we call the base, you can make the legs narrower, you can bend them, you can turn it into the finished shape. Now the first step, pretty easy. Take an idea, draw a stick figure. The last step is not so hard, but that middle step — going from the abstract description to the folded shape — that's hard. But that's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump. And I'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something. But we're going to start small. This base has a lot of flaps in it. We're going to learn how to make one flap. How would you make a single flap? Take a square. Fold it in half, fold it in half, fold it again, until it gets long and narrow, and then we'll say at the end of that, that's a flap. I could use that for a leg, an arm, anything like that. What paper went into that flap? Well, if I unfold it and go back to the crease pattern, you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap. So that's the flap, and all the rest of the paper's left over. I can use it for something else. Well, there are other ways of making a flap. There are other dimensions for flaps. If I make the flaps skinnier, I can use a bit less paper. If I make the flap as skinny as possible, I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed. And you can see there, it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap. There's other ways of making flaps. If I put the flap on the edge, it uses a half circle of paper. And if I make the flap from the middle, it uses a full circle. So, no matter how I make a flap, it needs some part of a circular region of paper. So now we're ready to scale up. What if I want to make something that has a lot of flaps? What do I need? I need a lot of circles. And in the 1990s, origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles. And here's where the dead people start to help us out, because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles. I can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements. And I can use those patterns now to create origami shapes. So we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles, you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules. That gives you the folds. Those folds fold into a base. You shape the base. You get a folded shape — in this case, a cockroach. And it's so simple. (Laughter) It's so simple that a computer could do it. And you say, "Well, you know, how simple is that?" But computers — you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms, and with this, we could. So I wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called TreeMaker, and you can download it from my website. It's free. It runs on all the major platforms — even Windows. (Laughter) And you just draw a stick figure, and it calculates the crease pattern. It does the circle packing, calculates the crease pattern, and if you use that stick figure that I just showed — which you can kind of tell, it's a deer, it's got antlers — you'll get this crease pattern. And if you take this crease pattern, you fold on the dotted lines, you'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer, with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted. And if you want a different deer, not a white-tailed deer, but you want a mule deer, or an elk, you change the packing, and you can do an elk. Or you could do a moose. Or, really, any other kind of deer. These techniques revolutionized this art. We found we could do insects, spiders, which are close, things with legs, things with legs and wings, things with legs and antennae. And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square. She's eating him. I call it "Snack Time." And you can do more than just insects. This — you can put details, toes and claws. A grizzly bear has claws. This tree frog has toes. Actually, lots of people in origami now put toes into their models. Toes have become an origami meme, because everyone's doing it. You can make multiple subjects. So these are a couple of instrumentalists. The guitar player from a single square, the bass player from a single square. And if you say, "Well, but the guitar, bass — that's not so hot. Do a little more complicated instrument." Well, then you could do an organ. (Laughter) And what this has allowed is the creation of origami-on-demand. So now people can say, "I want exactly this and this and this," and you can go out and fold it. And sometimes you create high art, and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work. But I want to show you some examples. Everything you'll see here, except the car, is origami. (Video) (Applause) Just to show you, this really was folded paper. Computers made things move, but these were all real, folded objects that we made. And we can use this not just for visuals, but it turns out to be useful even in the real world. Surprisingly, origami and the structures that we've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine, in science, in space, in the body, consumer electronics and more. And I want to show you some of these examples. One of the earliest was this pattern, this folded pattern, studied by Koryo Miura, a Japanese engineer. He studied a folding pattern, and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure. And he used it to design this solar array. It's an artist's rendition, but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995. Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's very simple. The telescope, going up in space, it unfolds in two places. It folds in thirds. It's a very simple pattern — you wouldn't even call that origami. They certainly didn't need to talk to origami artists. But if you want to go higher and go larger than this, then you might need some origami. Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab had an idea for a telescope much larger. They called it the Eyeglass. The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up, 100-meter diameter lens. So, imagine a lens the size of a football field. There were two groups of people who were interested in this: planetary scientists, who want to look up, and then other people, who wanted to look down. Whether you look up or look down, how do you get it up in space? You've got to get it up there in a rocket. And rockets are small. So you have to make it smaller. How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller? Well, about the only way is to fold it up somehow. So you have to do something like this. This was a small model. Folded lens, you divide up the panels, you add flexures. But this pattern's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters. So the Livermore engineers, wanting to make use of the work of dead people, or perhaps live origamists, said, "Let's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing." So they looked into the origami community, we got in touch with them, and I started working with them. And we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size, but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat, compact cylinder. And they adopted that for their first generation, which was not 100 meters — it was a five-meter. But this is a five-meter telescope — has about a quarter-mile focal length. And it works perfectly on its test range, and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle. Now, there is other origami in space. Japan Aerospace [Exploration] Agency flew a solar sail, and you can see here that the sail expands out, and you can still see the fold lines. The problem that's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination, but needs to be small for the journey. And that works whether you're going into space, or whether you're just going into a body. And this example is the latter. This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University. It holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination, but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there, through your blood vessels. And this stent folds down using an origami pattern, based on a model called the water bomb base. Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space. And they want to do their design by simulation. So they need to figure out how, in a computer, to flatten an airbag. And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation. And so they can do a simulation like this. Those are the origami creases forming, and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out, does it work? And that leads to a really interesting idea. You know, where did these things come from? Well, the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school. It's the same pattern, called the water bomb base. The airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects — things with legs. The thing is, that this often happens in math and science. When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life. Thanks. (Applause)

A computer that works like the brain

Kwabena Boahen

{0: 'Kwabena Boahen'}

{0: ['bioengineer']}

{0: 'Kwabena Boahen wants to understand how brains work -- and to build a computer that works like the brain by reverse-engineering the nervous system. His group at Stanford is developing Neurogrid, a hardware platform that will emulate the cortex’s inner workings.'}

2007-06-06

2008-07-30

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['brain', 'complexity', 'computers', 'design', 'engineering', 'science', 'technology', 'visualizations']

{125: 'How brain science will change computing', 184: '3 clues to understanding your brain', 229: 'My stroke of insight', 49129: 'How close are we to uploading our minds?', 1879: 'What is so special about the human brain?', 967: 'I am my connectome'}

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

Researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain's supercomputing powers in silicon -- because the messy, redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small, light, superfast computer.

I got my first computer when I was a teenager growing up in Accra, and it was a really cool device. You could play games with it. You could program it in BASIC. And I was fascinated. So I went into the library to figure out how did this thing work. I read about how the CPU is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory, the RAM and the ALU, the arithmetic and logic unit. And I thought to myself, this CPU really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system. But nobody was really worried about this. When computers were first introduced, they were said to be a million times faster than neurons. People were really excited. They thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain. This is a quote, actually, from Alan Turing: "In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person." This was in 1946. And now, in 2007, it's still not true. And so, the question is, why aren't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain? What people didn't realize, and I'm just beginning to realize right now, is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers. Let's take a look at some numbers. This is Blue Gene, the fastest computer in the world. It's got 120,000 processors; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second. That's 10 to the sixteenth. And they consume one and a half megawatts of power. So that would be really great, if you could add that to the production capacity in Tanzania. It would really boost the economy. Just to go back to the States, if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the States, you get 1,200 households in the U.S. That's how much power this computer uses. Now, let's compare this with the brain. This is a picture of, actually Rory Sayres' girlfriend's brain. Rory is a graduate student at Stanford. He studies the brain using MRI, and he claims that this is the most beautiful brain that he has ever scanned. (Laughter) So that's true love, right there. Now, how much computation does the brain do? I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second, which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does. So that's the question. The question is, how much — they are doing a similar amount of processing, similar amount of data — the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use? And it's actually as much as your laptop computer: it's just 10 watts. So what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses, the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop. So the question is, how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency? And let me just summarize. So the bottom line: the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have. How is the brain able to do this? Let's just take a look about how the brain works, and then I'll compare that with how computers work. So, this clip is from the PBS series, "The Secret Life of the Brain." It shows you these cells that process information. They are called neurons. They send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other, and where they contact each other, those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other. That process is called a synapse. You've got this huge network of cells interacting with each other — about 100 million of them, sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second. And that's basically what's going on in your brain right now as you're watching this. How does that compare with the way computers work? In the computer, you have all the data going through the central processing unit, and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck, whereas in the brain, what you have is these neurons, and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons. There's no bottleneck here. It's really a network in the literal sense of the word. The net is doing the work in the brain. If you just look at these two pictures, these kind of words pop into your mind. This is serial and it's rigid — it's like cars on a freeway, everything has to happen in lockstep — whereas this is parallel and it's fluid. Information processing is very dynamic and adaptive. So I'm not the first to figure this out. This is a quote from Brian Eno: "the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them." (Laughter) Brian actually said this in 1995. And nobody was listening then, but now people are beginning to listen because there's a pressing, technological problem that we face. And I'll just take you through that a little bit in the next few slides. This is — it's actually really this remarkable convergence between the devices that we use to compute in computers, and the devices that our brains use to compute. The devices that computers use are what's called a transistor. This electrode here, called the gate, controls the flow of current from the source to the drain — these two electrodes. And that current, electrical current, is carried by electrons, just like in your house and so on. And what you have here is, when you actually turn on the gate, you get an increase in the amount of current, and you get a steady flow of current. And when you turn off the gate, there's no current flowing through the device. Your computer uses this presence of current to represent a one, and the absence of current to represent a zero. Now, what's happening is that as transistors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, they no longer behave like this. In fact, they are starting to behave like the device that neurons use to compute, which is called an ion channel. And this is a little protein molecule. I mean, neurons have thousands of these. And it sits in the membrane of the cell and it's got a pore in it. And these are individual potassium ions that are flowing through that pore. Now, this pore can open and close. But, when it's open, because these ions have to line up and flow through, one at a time, you get a kind of sporadic, not steady — it's a sporadic flow of current. And even when you close the pore — which neurons can do, they can open and close these pores to generate electrical activity — even when it's closed, because these ions are so small, they can actually sneak through, a few can sneak through at a time. So, what you have is that when the pore is open, you get some current sometimes. These are your ones, but you've got a few zeros thrown in. And when it's closed, you have a zero, but you have a few ones thrown in. Now, this is starting to happen in transistors. And the reason why that's happening is that, right now, in 2007 — the technology that we are using — a transistor is big enough that several electrons can flow through the channel simultaneously, side by side. In fact, there's about 12 electrons can all be flowing this way. And that means that a transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels in parallel. Now, in a few years time, by 2015, we will shrink transistors so much. This is what Intel does to keep adding more cores onto the chip. Or your memory sticks that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them — before, it was 256. Transistors are getting smaller to allow this to happen, and technology has really benefitted from that. But what's happening now is that in 2015, the transistor is going to become so small, that it corresponds to only one electron at a time can flow through that channel, and that corresponds to a single ion channel. And you start having the same kind of traffic jams that you have in the ion channel. The current will turn on and off at random, even when it's supposed to be on. And that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up, and that's going to crash your machine. So, we are at the stage where we don't really know how to compute with these kinds of devices. And the only kind of thing — the only thing we know right now that can compute with these kinds of devices are the brain. OK, so a computer picks a specific item of data from memory, it sends it into the processor or the ALU, and then it puts the result back into memory. That's the red path that's highlighted. The way brains work, I told you all, you have got all these neurons. And the way they represent information is they break up that data into little pieces that are represented by pulses and different neurons. So you have all these pieces of data distributed throughout the network. And then the way that you process that data to get a result is that you translate this pattern of activity into a new pattern of activity, just by it flowing through the network. So you set up these connections such that the input pattern just flows and generates the output pattern. What you see here is that there's these redundant connections. So if this piece of data or this piece of the data gets clobbered, it doesn't show up over here, these two pieces can activate the missing part with these redundant connections. So even when you go to these crappy devices where sometimes you want a one and you get a zero, and it doesn't show up, there's redundancy in the network that can actually recover the missing information. It makes the brain inherently robust. What you have here is a system where you store data locally. And it's brittle, because each of these steps has to be flawless, otherwise you lose that data, whereas in the brain, you have a system that stores data in a distributed way, and it's robust. What I want to basically talk about is my dream, which is to build a computer that works like the brain. This is something that we've been working on for the last couple of years. And I'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina, which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball. We didn't do this by actually writing code, like you do in a computer. In fact, the processing that happens in that little piece of brain is very similar to the kind of processing that computers do when they stream video over the Internet. They want to compress the information — they just want to send the changes, what's new in the image, and so on — and that is how your eyeball is able to squeeze all that information down to your optic nerve, to send to the rest of the brain. Instead of doing this in software, or doing those kinds of algorithms, we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that's called the retina. And they figured out all the different cells, and they figured out the network, and we just took that network and we used it as the blueprint for the design of a silicon chip. So now the neurons are represented by little nodes or circuits on the chip, and the connections among the neurons are represented, actually modeled by transistors. And these transistors are behaving essentially just like ion channels behave in the brain. It will give you the same kind of robust architecture that I described. Here is actually what our artificial eye looks like. The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here. And the chip — I'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at Kareem Zaghloul, who's the student who designed this chip. Let me explain what you're going to see, OK, because it's putting out different kinds of information, it's not as straightforward as a camera. The retina chip extracts four different kinds of information. It extracts regions with dark contrast, which will show up on the video as red. And it extracts regions with white or light contrast, which will show up on the video as green. This is Kareem's dark eyes and that's the white background that you see here. And then it also extracts movement. When Kareem moves his head to the right, you will see this blue activity there; it represents regions where the contrast is increasing in the image, that's where it's going from dark to light. And you also see this yellow activity, which represents regions where contrast is decreasing; it's going from light to dark. And these four types of information — your optic nerve has about a million fibers in it, and 900,000 of those fibers send these four types of information. So we are really duplicating the kind of signals that you have on the optic nerve. What you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse, right? It doesn't light up green everywhere in the background, only on the edges, and then in the hair, and so on. And this is the same thing you see when people compress video to send: they want to make it very sparse, because that file is smaller. And this is what the retina is doing, and it's doing it just with the circuitry, and how this network of neurons that are interacting in there, which we've captured on the chip. But the point that I want to make — I'll show you up here. So this image here is going to look like these ones, but here I'll show you that we can reconstruct the image, so, you know, you can almost recognize Kareem in that top part there. And so, here you go. Yes, so that's the idea. When you stand still, you just see the light and dark contrasts. But when it's moving back and forth, the retina picks up these changes. And that's why, you know, when you're sitting here and something happens in your background, you merely move your eyes to it. There are these cells that detect change and you move your attention to it. So those are very important for catching somebody who's trying to sneak up on you. Let me just end by saying that this is what happens when you put Africa in a piano, OK. This is a steel drum here that has been modified, and that's what happens when you put Africa in a piano. And what I would like us to do is put Africa in the computer, and come up with a new kind of computer that will generate thought, imagination, be creative and things like that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Question for you, Kwabena. Do you put together in your mind the work you're doing, the future of Africa, this conference — what connections can we make, if any, between them? Kwabena Boahen: Yes, like I said at the beginning, I got my first computer when I was a teenager, growing up in Accra. And I had this gut reaction that this was the wrong way to do it. It was very brute force; it was very inelegant. I don't think that I would've had that reaction, if I'd grown up reading all this science fiction, hearing about RD2D2, whatever it was called, and just — you know, buying into this hype about computers. I was coming at it from a different perspective, where I was bringing that different perspective to bear on the problem. And I think a lot of people in Africa have this different perspective, and I think that's going to impact technology. And that's going to impact how it's going to evolve. And I think you're going to be able to see, use that infusion, to come up with new things, because you're coming from a different perspective. I think we can contribute. We can dream like everybody else. CA: Thanks Kwabena, that was really interesting. Thank you. (Applause)

Watch me fold origami (blindfolded)

Bruno Bowden

{0: 'Bruno Bowden', 1: 'Rufus Cappadocia'}

{0: ['engineer and origamist'], 1: ['cellist']}

{0: 'An engineer with Google (he helped build Google Earth), Bruno Bowden is also an enthusiastic folder of paper.', 1: 'Globe-trotting, genre-hopping cellist Rufus Cappadocia plays the music of our sphere.'}

2008-02-02

2008-08-01

TED2008

en

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

['cello', 'entertainment', 'music', 'origami', 'live music']

{321: 'The math and magic of origami', 138: 'A string quartet plays "Blue Room"', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 23722: 'How folding paper can get you to the moon', 1431: 'How to use a paper towel', 1173: 'A cello with many voices'}

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

After Robert Lang's talk on origami at TED2008, Bruno Bowden stepped onstage with a challenge -- he would fold one of Lang's astonishingly complicated origami figures, blindfolded, in under 2 minutes. He's accompanied by the cellist Rufus Cappadocia.

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

Shedding light on dark matter

Patricia Burchat

{0: 'Patricia Burchat'}

{0: ['particle physicist']}

{0: "Patricia Burchat studies the structure and distribution of dark matter and dark energy. These mysterious ingredients can't be measured in conventional ways, yet form a quarter of the mass of our universe."}

2008-02-02

2008-08-17

TED2008

en

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

['astronomy', 'big bang', 'dark matter', 'education', 'energy', 'physics', 'science', 'time', 'universe', 'telescopes']

{47: 'Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars', 253: "CERN's supercollider", 42: 'Is this our final century?', 1936: 'What we can learn from galaxies far, far away', 404: 'The design of the universe', 20753: "A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe"}

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

Physicist Patricia Burchat sheds light on two basic ingredients of our universe: dark matter and dark energy. Comprising 96% of the universe between them, they can't be directly measured, but their influence is immense.

As a particle physicist, I study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level. For most of my research career, I've been using accelerators, such as the electron accelerator at Stanford University, just up the road, to study things on the smallest scale. But more recently, I've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale. Because, as I'll explain to you, the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected. So I'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe, what it's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are — at least some of the big questions. So, recently, we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe — and by ordinary matter, I mean you, me, the planets, the stars, the galaxies — the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe. Almost a quarter, or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe, is stuff that's invisible. By invisible, I mean it doesn't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't reflect. It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to detect things. It doesn't interact at all. So how do we know it's there? We know it's there by its gravitational effects. In fact, this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale, and I'll be telling you about the evidence for that. What about the rest of the pie? The rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy. More about that later, OK. So for now, let's turn to the evidence for dark matter. In these galaxies, especially in a spiral galaxy like this, most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy. This huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy. So we have these stars going around in circles like this. As you can imagine, even if you know physics, this should be intuitive, OK — that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here, OK. So what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars, that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside. In other words, if we measured speed as a function of distance — this is the only time I'm going to show a graph, OK — we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy. When those measurements are made, instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant, as a function of distance. If it's constant, that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see. In fact, this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter. And this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves, and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy. So we see the galaxy and fixate on that, but it's actually a cloud of dark matter that's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy. Galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space; they tend to cluster. And this is an example of a very, actually, famous cluster, the Coma cluster. And there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster. They're the white, fuzzy, elliptical things here. So these galaxy clusters — we take a snapshot now, we take a snapshot in a decade, it'll look identical. But these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds. They're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster, OK. So all of these galaxies are moving. We can measure the speeds of these galaxies, their orbital velocities, and figure out how much mass is in this cluster. And again, what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see. Or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see that there's a lot of gas in this cluster, as well. But that cannot account for the mass either. In fact, there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter, OK. It would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly. I'm just putting this big, blue blob on there, OK, to try to remind you that it's there. Can we see it more visually? Yes, we can. And so let me lead you through how we can do this. So here's an observer: it could be an eye; it could be a telescope. And suppose there's a galaxy out here in the universe. How do we see that galaxy? A ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye. Now, how do we deduce where the galaxy is? Well, we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye, right? We say, the ray of light came this way; the galaxy must be there, OK. Now, suppose I put in the middle a cluster of galaxies — and don't forget the dark matter, OK. Now, if we consider a different ray of light, one going off like this, we now need to take into account what Einstein predicted when he developed general relativity. And that was that the gravitational field, due to mass, will deflect not only the trajectory of particles, but will deflect light itself. So this light ray will not continue in a straight line, but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye. Where will this observer see the galaxy? You can respond. Up, right? We extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here. Is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer's eye from that galaxy? Yes, great. I see people going down like this. So a ray of light could go down, be bent up into the observer's eye, and the observer sees a ray of light here. Now, take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe, OK, a three-dimensional space. Are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye? Yes! The rays would lie on a — I'd like to see — yeah, on a cone. So there's a whole ray of light — rays of light on a cone — that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer's eye. If there is a cone of light coming into my eye, what do I see? A circle, a ring. It's called an Einstein ring. Einstein predicted that, OK. Now, it will only be a perfect ring if the source, the deflector and the eyeball, in this case, are all in a perfectly straight line. If they're slightly skewed, we'll see a different image. Now, you can do an experiment tonight over the reception, OK, to figure out what that image will look like. Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect. We call this gravitational lensing. And so, this is your instrument, OK. (Laughter). But ignore the top part. It's the base that I want you to concentrate, OK. So, actually, at home, whenever we break a wineglass, I save the bottom, take it over to the machine shop. We shave it off, and I have a little gravitational lens, OK. So it's got the right shape to produce the lensing. And so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin. I grabbed a piece of graph paper — I'm a physicist. (Laughter) So, a napkin. Draw a little model galaxy in the middle. And now put the lens over the galaxy, and what you'll find is that you'll see a ring, an Einstein ring. Now, move the base off to the side, and the ring will split up into arcs, OK. And you can put it on top of any image. On the graph paper, you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted. And again, this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing. OK, so the question is: do we see this in the sky? Do we see arcs in the sky when we look at, say, a cluster of galaxies? And the answer is yes. And so, here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the Hubble Space Telescope. Well, first of all, for the golden shape galaxies — those are the galaxies in the cluster. They're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions, or mirages, practically, of the background galaxies. So the streaks that you see, all these streaks, are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away. So what we can do, then, is based on how much distortion we see in those images, we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster. And it's an enormous amount of mass. And also, you can tell by eye, by looking at this, that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies. They are centered on some more spread out structure, and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded, OK. So this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye. OK, so, a quick review then, to see that you're following. So the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter — this gravitationally attracting stuff — is that galaxies, the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. The speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. And we see these gravitational lensing effects, these distortions that say that, again, clusters are embedded in dark matter. OK. So now, let's turn to dark energy. So to understand the evidence for dark energy, we need to discuss something that Stephen Hawking referred to in the previous session. And that is the fact that space itself is expanding. So if we imagine a section of our infinite universe — and so I've put down four spiral galaxies, OK — and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures, so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure, horizontal or vertical, for measuring where things are. If you could do this, what you would find that with each passing day, each passing year, each passing billions of years, OK, the distance between galaxies is getting greater. And it's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space. They're not necessarily moving through space. They're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger, OK. That's what the expansion of the universe or space means. So they're moving further apart. Now, what Stephen Hawking mentioned, as well, is that after the Big Bang, space expanded at a very rapid rate. But because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space, it tends to slow down the expansion of the space, OK. So the expansion slows down with time. So, in the last century, OK, people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever; whether it would slow down, you know, will be slowing down, but continue forever; slow down and stop, asymptotically stop; or slow down, stop, and then reverse, so it starts to contract again. So a little over a decade ago, two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down, OK. By how much less is it expanding today, compared to, say, a couple of billion years ago? The startling answer to this question, OK, from these experiments, was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago, OK. So the expansion of space is actually speeding up. This was a completely surprising result. There is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen, OK. No one was predicting ahead of time this is what's going to be found. It was the opposite of what was expected. So we need something to be able to explain that. Now it turns out, in the mathematics, you can put it in as a term that's an energy, but it's a completely different type of energy from anything we've ever seen before. We call it dark energy, and it has this effect of causing space to expand. But we don't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point, OK. So it's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in. Now, so at this point, then, what I want to really emphasize to you, is that, first of all, dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, OK. There are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe, and they have very different effects. Dark matter, because it gravitationally attracts, it tends to encourage the growth of structure, OK. So clusters of galaxies will tend to form, because of all this gravitational attraction. Dark energy, on the other hand, is putting more and more space between the galaxies, makes it, the gravitational attraction between them decrease, and so it impedes the growth of structure. So by looking at things like clusters of galaxies, and how they — their number density, how many there are as a function of time — we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming. In terms of dark matter, I said that we don't have any, you know, really persuasive argument for dark energy. Do we have anything for dark matter? And the answer is yes. We have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter. Now, what do I mean by well motivated? I mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon, OK, things that I haven't even talked about, that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting, new particle. So, this is exactly what you want in physics: where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else. But we don't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate, OK. One or both, who knows? Or it could be something completely different. Now, we look for these dark matter particles because, after all, they are here in the room, OK, and they didn't come in the door. They just pass through anything. They can come through the building, through the Earth — they're so non-interacting. So one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it. So a crystal that will ring if that happens. So one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector. And they've put it deep down in an iron mine in Minnesota, OK, deep under the ground, and in fact, in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far. They haven't seen anything, OK, but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are. There's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy, to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this. The Large Hadron Collider, a particle physics accelerator, that we'll be turning on later this year. It is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. Now, because they are so non-interactive, they will actually escape the detector, so their signature will be missing energy, OK. Now, unfortunately, there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy, so it will be hard to tell the difference. And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy — ground-based telescopes, and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy. So in terms of the big questions: what is dark matter? What is dark energy? The big questions facing physics. And I'm sure you have lots of questions, which I very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours, while I'm here. Thank you. (Applause)

A family tree for humanity

Spencer Wells

{0: 'Spencer Wells'}

{0: ['genographer']}

{0: 'Spencer Wells studies human diversity -- the process by which humanity, which springs from a single common source, has become so astonishingly diverse and widespread.'}

2007-06-06

2008-08-18

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'DNA', 'anthropology', 'culture', 'evolution', 'genetics', 'race', 'science', 'diversity', 'indigenous peoples']

{69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 331: 'DNA folding, in detail', 168: "The search for humanity's roots", 1213: 'DNA clues to our inner neanderthal', 315: "A dig for humanity's origins", 1751: 'Bring back the woolly mammoth!'}

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

All humans share some common bits of DNA, passed down to us from our African ancestors. Geneticist Spencer Wells talks about how his Genographic Project will use this shared DNA to figure out how we are -- in all our diversity -- truly connected.

Jambo, bonjour, zdravstvujtye, dayo: these are a few of the languages that I've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks, as I've been to 17 countries I think I'm up to, on this crazy tour I've been doing, checking out various aspects of the project that we're doing. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about later on. And visiting some pretty incredible places, places like Mongolia, Cambodia, New Guinea, South Africa, Tanzania twice — I was here a month ago. And the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing, for lots of reasons. You see some incredible stuff. And you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe. And the thing that you really take away from that, the kind of surface thing that you take away from it, is not that we're all one, although I'm going to tell you about that, but rather how different we are. There is so much diversity around the globe. 6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people, all different colors, shapes, sizes. You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species. How do we explain that diversity? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, is how we're using the tools of genetics, population genetics in particular, to tell us how we generated this diversity, and how long it took. Now, the problem of human diversity, like all big scientific questions — how do you explain something like that — can be broken down into sub-questions. And you can ferret away at those little sub-questions. First one is really a question of origins. Do we all share a common origin, in fact? And given that we do — and that's the assumption everybody, I think, in this room would make — when was that? When did we originate as a species? How long have we been divergent from each other? And the second question is related, but slightly different. If we do spring from a common source, how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe, and in the process generate all of this diversity, the different ways of life, the different appearances, the different languages around the world? Well, the question of origins, as with so many other questions in biology, seems to have been answered by Darwin over a century ago. In "The Descent of Man," he wrote, "In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It's therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere." So we're done, we can go home — finished the origin question. Well, not quite. Because Darwin was talking about our distant ancestry, our common ancestry with apes. And it is quite clear that apes originated on the African continent. Around 23 million years ago, they appear in the fossil record. Africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time, due to the vagaries of plate tectonics, floating around the Indian Ocean. Bumped into Eurasia around 16 million years ago, and then we had the first African exodus, as we call it. The apes that left at that time ended up in Southeast Asia, became the gibbons and the orangutans. And the ones that stayed on in Africa evolved into the gorillas, the chimpanzees and us. So, yes, if you're talking about our common ancestry with apes, it's very clear, by looking at the fossil record, we started off here. But that's not really the question I'm asking. I'm asking about our human ancestry, things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room. If they were peering over your shoulder, you wouldn't leap back, like that. What about our human ancestry? Because if we go far enough back, we share a common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. DNA ties us all together, so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back — over a billion years. What we're asking about though is human ancestry. How do we study that? Well, historically, it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology. Digging things up out of the ground, and largely on the basis of morphology — the way things are shaped, often skull shape — saying, "This looks a little bit more like us than that, so this must be my ancestor. This must be who I'm directly descended from." The field of paleoanthropology, I'll argue, gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but it doesn't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists. What do I mean by that? You're looking at a great example here. These are three extinct species of hominids, potential human ancestors. All dug up just west of here in Olduvai Gorge, by the Leakey family. And they're all dating to roughly the same time. From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus — now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time. That means that not all three could be my direct ancestor. Which one of these guys am I actually related to? Possibilities about our ancestry, but not the probabilities that we're really looking for. Well, a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently — again, largely skull shape. The first person to do this systematically was Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist, who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet. You think you've got a tough job? And he did a pretty good job. He categorized about 12,000 species in "Systema Naturae." He actually coined the term Homo sapiens — it means wise man in Latin. But looking around the world at the diversity of humans, he said, "Well, you know, we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories." And he talked about Africans and Americans and Asians and Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he termed "Monstrosus," which basically included all the people he didn't like, including imaginary folk like elves. It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-Darwinian era. Except, if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity. Human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30, 40 years ago — Carlton Coon is the best example — had been diverging from each other — this was in the post-Darwinian era — for over a million years, since the time of Homo erectus. But based on what data? Very little. Very little. Morphology and a lot of guesswork. Well, what I'm going to talk about today, what I'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem. Instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry, digging things up out of the ground, possible ancestors, and saying it on the basis of morphology — which we still don't completely understand, we don't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation — what we need to do is turn the problem on its head. Because what we're really asking is a genealogical problem, or a genealogical question. What we're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today. And as any genealogist will tell you — anybody have a member of the family, or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree, trace back in time? You start in the present, with relationships you're certain about. You and your siblings, you have a parent in common. You and your cousins share a grandparent in common. You gradually trace further and further back into the past, adding these ever more distant relationships. But eventually, no matter how good you are at digging up the church records, and all that stuff, you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall. A point beyond which you don't know anything else about your ancestors, and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance. Who were these people who came before? We have no written record. Well, actually, we do. Written in our DNA, in our genetic code — we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species. And that's what we study. Now, a quick primer on DNA. I suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist. It is a very long, linear molecule, a coded version of how to make another copy of you. It's your blueprint. It's composed of four subunits: A, C, G and T, we call them. And it's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint. How long is it? Well, it's billions of these subunits in length. A haploid genome — we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes — a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length. And the whole thing, if you add it all together, is over six billion nucleotides long. If you take all the DNA out of one cell in your body, and stretch it end to end, it's around two meters long. If you take all the DNA out of every cell in your body, and you stretch it end to end, it would reach from here to the moon and back, thousands of times. It's a lot of information. And so when you're copying this DNA molecule to pass it on, it's a pretty tough job. Imagine the longest book you can think of, "War and Peace." Now multiply it by 100. And imagine copying that by hand. And you're working away until late at night, and you're very, very careful, and you're drinking coffee and you're paying attention, but, occasionally, when you're copying this by hand, you're going to make a little typo, a spelling mistake — substitute an I for an E, or a C for a T. Same thing happens to our DNA as it's being passed on through the generations. It doesn't happen very often. We have a proofreading mechanism built in. But when it does happen, and these changes get transmitted down through the generations, they become markers of descent. If you share a marker with someone, it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past, the person who first had that change in their DNA. And it's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation, the pattern of these markers in people all over the world, and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history, that we've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today. These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home message? Well, the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within Africa, among Africans. That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer. And what that means is that we originated in Africa. It's written in our DNA. Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa. And at some point in the past, a sub-group of Africans left the African continent to go out and populate the rest of the world. Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person — Mitochondrial Eve, you might have heard about her — in Africa, an African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today. But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y-chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago. That's only about 2,000 human generations, the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. Such an amazing story. We're all effectively part of an extended African family. Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? Well, that's a big question. These "why" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones, the ones that are tough to answer. And so when all else fails, talk about the weather. What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough, getting very cold. The Northern Hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick. Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet — about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn — and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. This is a paleo-climatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation. So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails. And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period. But then 50, 60, 70 thousand years ago, somewhere in that region, all hell breaks loose. Art makes its appearance. The stone tools become much more finely crafted. The evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species, at particular times of the year. The population size started to expand. Probably, according to what many linguists believe, fully modern language, syntactic language — subject, verb, object — that we use to convey complex ideas, like I'm doing now, appeared around that time. We became much more social. The social networks expanded. This change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in Africa, and they allowed us to start to expand around the world. We've been talking at this conference about African success stories. Well, you want the ultimate African success story? Look in the mirror. You're it. The reason you're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in Africa — probably somewhere in the region where we're sitting right now, around 60, 70 thousand years ago — allowing us not only to survive in Africa, but to expand out of Africa. An early coastal migration along the south coast of Asia, leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago, reaching Australia very rapidly, by 50,000 years ago. A slightly later migration up into the Middle East. These would have been savannah hunters. So those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours, you'll get to see what a real savannah is like. And it's basically a meat locker. People who would have specialized in killing the animals, hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs, moving up, following the grasslands into the Middle East around 45,000 years ago, during one of the rare wet phases in the Sahara. Migrating eastward, following the grasslands, because that's what they were adapted to live on. And when they reached Central Asia, they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway, a grassland super-highway. The grasslands at that time — this was during the last ice age — stretched basically from Germany all the way over to Korea, and the entire continent was open to them. Entering Europe around 35,000 years ago, and finally, a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable, Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, during the last ice age — temperature was at -70, -80, even -100, perhaps — migrating into the Americas, ultimately reaching that final frontier. An amazing story, and it happened first in Africa. The changes that allowed us to do that, the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us, allowing us to create novel cultures, allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one I've just been on. Now, that story I just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world, the great Paleolithic wanderings of our species. And that's the story that I told a couple of years ago in my book, "The Journey of Man," and a film that we made with the same title. And as we were finishing up that film — it was co-produced with National Geographic — I started talking to the folks at NG about this work. And they got really excited about it. They liked the film, but they said, "You know, we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins, where we all came from, using the tools of DNA to map the migrations around the world. You know, the study of human origins is kind of in our DNA, and we want to take it to the next level. What do you want to do next?" Which is a great question to be asked by National Geographic. And I said, "Well, you know, what I've sketched out here is just that. It is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet. And it's based on a few thousand people we've sampled from, you know, a handful of populations around the world. Studied a few genetic markers, and there are lots of gaps on this map. We've just connected the dots. What we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more — hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world." And that was the genesis of the Genographic Project. The project launched in April 2005. It has three core components. Obviously, science is a big part of it. The field research that we're doing around the world with indigenous peoples. People who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost. So my ancestors come from all over northern Europe. I live in the Eastern Seaboard of North America when I'm not traveling. Where am I indigenous to? Nowhere really. My genes are all jumbled up. But there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the DNA results. That's the focus of the field research, the centers that we've set up all over the world — 10 of them, top population geneticists. But, in addition, we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world. How often do you get to participate in a big scientific project? The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission. In this case, you actually can. You can go onto our website, Nationalgeographic.com/genographic. You can order a kit. You can test your own DNA. And you can actually submit those results to the database, and tell us a little about your genealogical background, have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort. Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project. The majority going to something we call the Legacy Fund. It's a charitable entity, basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational, cultural projects initiated by them. They apply to this fund in order to do various projects, and I'll show you a couple of examples. So how are we doing on the project? We've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world. The most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago, which has raised around five million dollars, the majority of which, at least half, is going back into the Legacy Fund. We've just awarded the first Legacy Grants totaling around 500,000 dollars. Projects around the world — documenting oral poetry in Sierra Leone, preserving traditional weaving patterns in Gaza, language revitalization in Tajikistan, etc., etc. So the project is going very, very well, and I urge you to check out the website and watch this space. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How photography connects us

David Griffin

{0: 'David Griffin'}

{0: ['director of photography', 'national geographic']}

{0: 'As director of photography for National Geographic, David Griffin works with some of the most powerful photographs the world has ever seen.'}

2008-02-02

2008-08-19

TED2008

en

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

['animals', 'culture', 'design', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'photography', 'storytelling']

{40: 'The story of life in photographs', 69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 273: 'The worldwide web of belief and ritual', 2517: 'The passing of time, caught in a single photo', 1353: 'Impossible photography', 54358: 'Does photographing a moment steal the experience from you?'}

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

The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world. In a talk filled with glorious images, he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories.

Let's just start by looking at some great photographs. This is an icon of National Geographic, an Afghan refugee taken by Steve McCurry. But the Harvard Lampoon is about to come out with a parody of National Geographic, and I shudder to think what they're going to do to this photograph. Oh, the wrath of Photoshop. This is a jet landing at San Francisco, by Bruce Dale. He mounted a camera on the tail. A poetic image for a story on Tolstoy, by Sam Abell. Pygmies in the DRC, by Randy Olson. I love this photograph because it reminds me of Degas' bronze sculptures of the little dancer. A polar bear swimming in the Arctic, by Paul Nicklen. Polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth — they're not very good swimmers — and we know what's happening to the ice. These are camels moving across the Rift Valley in Africa, photographed by Chris Johns. Shot straight down, so these are the shadows of the camels. This is a rancher in Texas, by William Albert Allard, a great portraitist. And Jane Goodall, making her own special connection, photographed by Nick Nichols. This is a soap disco in Spain, photographed by David Alan Harvey. And David said that there was lot of weird stuff happening on the dance floor. But, hey, at least it's hygienic. (Laughter) These are sea lions in Australia doing their own dance, by David Doubilet. And this is a comet, captured by Dr. Euan Mason. And finally, the bow of the Titanic, without movie stars, photographed by Emory Kristof. Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today's saturated, media world, because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment. Here's an example. Four years ago, I was at the beach with my son, and he was learning how to swim in this relatively soft surf of the Delaware beaches. But I turned away for a moment, and he got caught into a riptide and started to be pulled out towards the jetty. I can stand here right now and see, as I go tearing into the water after him, the moments slowing down and freezing into this arrangement. I can see the rocks are over here. There's a wave about to crash onto him. I can see his hands reaching out, and I can see his face in terror, looking at me, saying, "Help me, Dad." I got him. The wave broke over us. We got back on shore; he was fine. We were a little bit rattled. But this flashbulb memory, as it's called, is when all the elements came together to define not just the event, but my emotional connection to it. And this is what a photograph taps into when it makes its own powerful connection to a viewer. Now I have to tell you, I was talking to Kyle last week about this, that I was going to tell this story. And he said, "Oh, yeah, I remember that too! I remember my image of you was that you were up on the shore yelling at me." (Laughter) I thought I was a hero. (Laughter) So, this represents — this is a cross-sample of some remarkable images taken by some of the world's greatest photojournalists, working at the very top of their craft — except one. This photograph was taken by Dr. Euan Mason in New Zealand last year, and it was submitted and published in National Geographic. Last year, we added a section to our website called "Your Shot," where anyone can submit photographs for possible publication. And it has become a wild success, tapping into the enthusiast photography community. The quality of these amateur photographs can, at times, be amazing. And seeing this reinforces, for me, that every one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them. But to be a great photojournalist, you have to have more than just one or two great photographs in you. You've got to be able to make them all the time. But even more importantly, you need to know how to create a visual narrative. You need to know how to tell a story. So I'm going to share with you some coverages that I feel demonstrate the storytelling power of photography. Photographer Nick Nichols went to document a very small and relatively unknown wildlife sanctuary in Chad, called Zakouma. The original intent was to travel there and bring back a classic story of diverse species, of an exotic locale. And that is what Nick did, up to a point. This is a serval cat. He's actually taking his own picture, shot with what's called a camera trap. There's an infrared beam that's going across, and he has stepped into the beam and taken his photograph. These are baboons at a watering hole. Nick — the camera, again, an automatic camera took thousands of pictures of this. And Nick ended up with a lot of pictures of the rear ends of baboons. (Laughter) A lion having a late night snack — notice he's got a broken tooth. And a crocodile walks up a riverbank toward its den. I love this little bit of water that comes off the back of his tail. But the centerpiece species of Zakouma are the elephants. It's one of the largest intact herds in this part of Africa. Here's a photograph shot in moonlight, something that digital photography has made a big difference for. It was with the elephants that this story pivoted. Nick, along with researcher Dr. Michael Fay, collared the matriarch of the herd. They named her Annie, and they began tracking her movements. The herd was safe within the confines of the park, because of this dedicated group of park rangers. But once the annual rains began, the herd would begin migrating to feeding grounds outside the park. And that's when they ran into trouble. For outside the safety of the park were poachers, who would hunt them down only for the value of their ivory tusks. The matriarch that they were radio tracking, after weeks of moving back and forth, in and out of the park, came to a halt outside the park. Annie had been killed, along with 20 members of her herd. And they only came for the ivory. This is actually one of the rangers. They were able to chase off one of the poachers and recover this ivory, because they couldn't leave it there, because it's still valuable. But what Nick did was he brought back a story that went beyond the old-school method of just straight, "Isn't this an amazing world?" And instead, created a story that touched our audiences deeply. Instead of just knowledge of this park, he created an understanding and an empathy for the elephants, the rangers and the many issues surrounding human-wildlife conflicts. Now let's go over to India. Sometimes you can tell a broad story in a focused way. We were looking at the same issue that Richard Wurman touches upon in his new world population project. For the first time in history, more people live in urban, rather than rural, environments. And most of that growth is not in the cities, but in the slums that surround them. Jonas Bendiksen, a very energetic photographer, came to me and said, "We need to document this, and here's my proposal. Let's go all over the world and photograph every single slum around the world." And I said, "Well, you know, that might be a bit ambitious for our budget." So instead, what we did was we decided to, instead of going out and doing what would result in what we'd consider sort of a survey story — where you just go in and see just a little bit of everything — we put Jonas into Dharavi, which is part of Mumbai, India, and let him stay there, and really get into the heart and soul of this really major part of the city. What Jonas did was not just go and do a surface look at the awful conditions that exist in such places. He saw that this was a living and breathing and vital part of how the entire urban area functioned. By staying tightly focused in one place, Jonas tapped into the soul and the enduring human spirit that underlies this community. And he did it in a beautiful way. Sometimes, though, the only way to tell a story is with a sweeping picture. We teamed up underwater photographer Brian Skerry and photojournalist Randy Olson to document the depletion of the world's fisheries. We weren't the only ones to tackle this subject, but the photographs that Brian and Randy created are among the best to capture both the human and natural devastation of overfishing. Here, in a photo by Brian, a seemingly crucified shark is caught up in a gill net off of Baja. I've seen sort of OK pictures of bycatch, the animals accidentally scooped up while fishing for a specific species. But here, Brian captured a unique view by positioning himself underneath the boat when they threw the waste overboard. And Brian then went on to even greater risk to get this never-before-made photograph of a trawl net scraping the ocean bottom. Back on land, Randy Olson photographed a makeshift fish market in Africa, where the remains of filleted fish were sold to the locals, the main parts having already been sent to Europe. And here in China, Randy shot a jellyfish market. As prime food sources are depleted, the harvest goes deeper into the oceans and brings in more such sources of protein. This is called fishing down the food chain. But there are also glimmers of hope, and I think anytime we're doing a big, big story on this, we don't really want to go and just look at all the problems. We also want to look for solutions. Brian photographed a marine sanctuary in New Zealand, where commercial fishing had been banned — the result being that the overfished species have been restored, and with them a possible solution for sustainable fisheries. Photography can also compel us to confront issues that are potentially distressing and controversial. James Nachtwey, who was honored at last year's TED, took a look at the sweep of the medical system that is utilized to handle the American wounded coming out of Iraq. It is like a tube where a wounded soldier enters on one end and exits back home, on the other. Jim started in the battlefield. Here, a medical technician tends to a wounded soldier on the helicopter ride back to the field hospital. Here is in the field hospital. The soldier on the right has the name of his daughter tattooed across his chest, as a reminder of home. From here, the more severely wounded are transported back to Germany, where they meet up with their families for the first time. And then back to the States to recuperate at veterans' hospitals, such as here in Walter Reed. And finally, often fitted with high-tech prosthesis, they exit the medical system and attempt to regain their pre-war lives. Jim took what could have been a straight-up medical science story and gave it a human dimension that touched our readers deeply. Now, these stories are great examples of how photography can be used to address some of our most important topics. But there are also times when photographers simply encounter things that are, when it comes down to it, just plain fun. Photographer Paul Nicklin traveled to Antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals. They have been rarely photographed, partly because they are considered one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean. In fact, a year earlier, a researcher had been grabbed by one and pulled down to depth and killed. So you can imagine Paul was maybe a little bit hesitant about getting into the water. Now, what leopard seals do mostly is, they eat penguins. You know of "The March of the Penguins." This is sort of the munch of the penguins. (Laughter) Here a penguin goes up to the edge and looks out to see if the coast is clear. And then everybody kind of runs out and goes out. But then Paul got in the water. And he said he was never really afraid of this. Well, this one female came up to him. She's probably — it's a shame you can't see it in the photograph, but she's 12 feet long. So, she is pretty significant in size. And Paul said he was never really afraid, because she was more curious about him than threatened. This mouthing behavior, on the right, was really her way of saying to him, "Hey, look how big I am!" Or you know, "My, what big teeth you have." (Laughter) Then Paul thinks that she simply took pity on him. To her, here was this big, goofy creature in the water that for some reason didn't seem to be interested in chasing penguins. So what she did was she started to bring penguins to him, alive, and put them in front of him. She dropped them off, and then they would swim away. She'd kind of look at him, like "What are you doing?" Go back and get them, and then bring them back and drop them in front of him. And she did this over the course of a couple of days, until the point where she got so frustrated with him that she started putting them directly on top of his head. (Laughter) Which just resulted in a fantastic photograph. (Laughter) Eventually, though, Paul thinks that she just figured that he was never going to survive. This is her just puffing out, you know, snorting out in disgust. (Laughter) And lost interest with him, and went back to what she does best. Paul set out to photograph a relatively mysterious and unknown creature, and came back with not just a collection of photographs, but an amazing experience and a great story. It is these kinds of stories, ones that go beyond the immediate or just the superficial that demonstrate the power of photojournalism. I believe that photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today. Thank you. (Applause)

Close-up card magic with a twist

Lennart Green

{0: 'Lennart Green'}

{0: ['close-up card magician']}

{0: 'Cards that fly all over the table, spill onto the floor, and disappear beneath a laser beam. Welcome to the chaotic and flabbergasting magical world of Lennart Green, grand master of close-up card trickery.'}

2005-02-02

2008-08-20

TED2005

en

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

['entertainment', 'humor', 'illusion', 'magic']

{310: 'Brain magic', 78: 'Visual illusions that show how we (mis)think', 22: 'Why people believe weird things', 2206: 'A magical search for a coincidence', 24048: 'How many ways can you arrange a deck of cards?', 1602: 'A cyber-magic card trick like no other'}

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

Like your uncle at a family party, the rumpled Swedish doctor Lennart Green says, "Pick a card, any card." But what he does with those cards is pure magic -- flabbergasting, lightning-fast, how-does-he-do-it? magic.

My favorite topic is shortcuts. The master of shortcuts — it's, of course, nature. But I will demonstrate different ways to get rid of difficulties and go to the point, to find an answer probably much quicker than Arthur did. So, first, we violate the common sense, the logic. All of you, if you hold your hand like this, 90 degrees — all of you. Not you. All of you, right? Palm up. If you do this, the common, the logic says you must turn the wrist. Do you agree? Good. But I will first teach you a method, how you can do it without moving the wrist, and then the shortcut. You can do it immediately, right? Hold the hand like this, palm up. Don't move the wrist. The wrist is — I doesn't speak very many, but I do the best, what I are. Right-molded you say, with iron? That was a joke, actually, and I — OK. Hold the hand palm up. Do this, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. Forward, don't move the wrist. Up, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. And forward. Yeah. Now — (Laughter) — logic, logically, you have got to this position from this, without moving the wrist. (Laughter) Now, the shortcut. (Laughter) But it was six moves. Now with one move. I start here, palm down, you can follow. And then look at me. Yeah! (Laughter) One move. OK. So, that was the warming up. Now, I need an assistant. I talked to a nice girl before, Zoe. She has left. No! A big hand. (Applause) Good. Nice. And you can sit over there. One item here was water, right? And I will give my tribute to water. I think it's enough with water for me. The other guys can talk about — cheers. (Laughter) Beer has about — there's a lot of water in beer. (Laughter) So, now I will demonstrate different ways of memorizing, control cards and so on. And I think I'll take off this one. I work with a special method to do it, quick. I work with precision — oh, sorry — control and a very powerful ... memory system, right? (Laughter) So, if — I have studied the poker. I like to gamble. Officially, I don't gamble but ... So, if we are — if we have five person, and I will do a five-handed poker game. Now I will interact. So a different person all the time, so not the same person can answer. So we have an agreement. Which one shall have a good poker hand? Which number? One, two, three, four or five? (Audience: Three.) Lennart Green: Three — good. And here, I had a mat here to make it a little — the critical moment is — sorry. If a card shark gathers the cards together, immediately when he — before he deals the card. Now, so I think, number three, I have arranged them in a full house. (Laughter) With queens and — it's OK — queens and tens. That's a challenge. I like this. I will explain later. One, two, three, four, five. I start with three queens. So here you see the contrast when I treat the cards. And two tens. Yeah. Thank you. (Applause) But also the other hand is good, if all the other guys have good hands too. So these guys have actually a stronger hand — three aces and two kings. This guy beats them with four of a kind, or deuce — deuce. No reaction? That with even — OK, and this. These look in order, I'm probably — hopefully — yeah. Three, four, five, six, seven and ... But, of course, I will have the winning hand. Ten, jack, queen, king, ace. Yeah. So, good. (Laughter) So the hand that looks so good from the beginning, number three, at the end was actually the lowest hand. Such life. Right? So, please mix them. Now, if you are interested, I will demonstrate some underground techniques. Yes? I work with kind of estimation, shuffle tracking — ah, good. Impressive. Thank you. (Laughter) So, first, the first term is estimation. Here, I can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush. Of course, I can count the cards, but this is much quicker. Right? You agree. So here I have, actually — I know exactly where the cards are. So here, I can make a bet, and this is actually one of the points where I get my money. So here: 10, jack, queen, king, ace. OK. (Applause) Next is a term — I do it quick. I call this stealing. So here, I think I know about where the cards are. I will spread the cards and you'll say stop, when I point to them, right. Point, say stop. Zoe: Stop. LG: Here — you see some are missing? And that's the stealing cards, which I did. (Laughter) OK. Now, another term called shuffle tracking. Shuffle tracking means I keep track of the cards, even if another person shuffles. This is a little risky. So — because if you look, now, I can still see it. You agree? But if you square — square, and shuffle, and then a cut. So here, to follow my cards, I must look at the shuffle from the begin — ah, we are started together. It's OK, it's OK. Come to — no, no, no, no. I'm joking, yeah? Any style — yeah, good. Here I have to calculate, but actually, I don't like to calculate. I work direct with the right brain. If you pass the left brain, you have to take care of logic and common sense. Direct in the right brain, that's much better. And so — (Laughter) — Arthur Benjamin did a little of the same thing. And if you work with, in the right atmosphere, with humor, you have — that's the password to the cosmic bank of knowledge, where you can find any solution of any problem. OK. Now, I drop the cards, and you say stop anyway, right? Not at the last card. Zoe: Stop. LG: Yeah. When I'm sober, I do this much quicker, but we will check. (Laughter) Ah, not in order, it — that was a mistake. No, I'm kidding. (Applause) No, now and then I put in a mistake, just to emphasize how difficult it is. Right? Yeah, last night I forgot that. That was a mistake. But now I'm glad I remember it. So, this deck is bought here. Sorry. I have a little pad to make it a little softer. This deck is bought here in America. It's called "Bicycle." And this deck is very flexible, but not so many people know, if you check, if you press at the right spots, you see how thin and flexible this deck is, right? Now, you can carry this in your wallet, so ... You don't see it, make no reaction? (Laughter) So, but here, and — is the camera getting too much? No. (Laughter) Yeah? (Audience: It's getting too much.) LG: Pardon? But then, when we will have it back, you do this. But not too much. Then you have to push it down again. Here, please. If you push these heaps — everyone see — push them together so they are really interlaced, right? Yeah, good. Perfect. Just push them through, good. Thank you. And then, I will demonstrate a thing from Russian satellite, stealen — stolen, probably copied from America but we will see. Here — shortcuts. I talk about shortcuts. Now I go very quick through the deck and try to find some pattern. The new chaos theory is already old, right? But you know, I think you are familiar with fractals — the Mandelbrot spirals and all these things. And it's much easier to memorize cards in a pattern way, and not concentrate. If you concentrate and calculate, then you go to — then it's the left brain. But if you just look and talk in another language ... Yeah, great. I think I have it. So now, different persons, older, tap. Please name any card, anyone. (Audience: Jack of spades.) LG: Jack of spades. Jack of spades. I think jack of spades is number 12 from the top. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Yes, right. So — oh, jack of spades. You said spades? (Audience: Yes.) LG: Ah. My fault. Don't applaud, this was clubs. So, jack of spades. I think ... 23 — 24, sorry, 24. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 — ah, 25, yes. It's the last. Now, I do it quicker, better. OK. Another person. Oh, I forgot, I shouldn't shuffle but I think — (Laughter) — actually, my technique is to peek, all the time. When I lift the heap, I peek. You see, yeah, perfect. Three, four, five, six. Then I calculate — yeah, good. (Laughter) Another person, another card. (Audience: Seven of diamonds.) LG: Seven of diamonds. Perfect, my favorite, yeah, seven. So I will do it quick, very quick, but in slow motion, so you can follow. (Laughter) Seven of? (Audience: Diamonds.) LG: Diamonds, good. I start here. Good, thank you. (Applause) The thing I did — I peeked. I know where the card were, then I chose it. So another person, another card. (Laughter) Another person. (Audience: Ten of diamonds.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Ten of diamonds.) LG: Ten of diamonds, yeah. I think I do it the same way. I like to, so I know where it is. Ten of diamonds. But now I do it the regular speed, right? Ten of diamonds. Good. Maybe you will cut? Lift. Excellent. So, thank you. Another person, another card. (Audience: Five of clubs.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Five of clubs.) LG: Five of clubs. It's not the same person, even if it's the same spot. We can take some over there later. So now, I will drop the cards. And you'll say stop, anywhere. Got it? Five of clubs. Not the last. Yes, that's difficult to find a card here. (Laughter) We do it again. The person who said five of clubs say stop, when the cards are in the air, right? (Audience: Stop.) LG: Very good. OK. (Applause) OK, I had to use a little force there. I think we save five of clubs. And now a card with a contrast of five of clubs. (Audience: Queen of hearts.) LG: Queen of hearts, yeah. Excellent. I love that card. Here, I will do the most difficult thing. For example, you are sitting in Las Vegas, and you're betting, and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake. Feel, it's just the regular, one card. And now, when I lift this card, it shall be your card. What was your card? (Audience: Queen of hearts.) LG: Queen of? Queen of hearts. So that's a tough challenge, right? So here, I grab — you know this? Five of clubs ... and queen of hearts. Yes! This is a tough one, because here I must take advantage of — I switch it with the five of clubs. So, now a false count. Which card shall I use? Queen or five? Zoe: The queen. LG: Queen, yes. So, I use the queen, and here's five of clubs. The false count — and the number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight — you say the same card all the time. Eight, nine, 10. This is a kind of optical deal, right? When I put one card at a table — look, it's not one card. It's — look, it's a bunch of cards that gives this impression. Yeah. Now some hard stuff. I think we keep the queen here, yes. Now, to the satellites things. This — oh sorry, don't look at the beam. My fault. (Laughter) This is high-frequency laser, and it's enough with a fraction of a second to destroy the retina completely. Right, sorry, my — I should have mentioned that, yeah. But you can relax, because it takes half an hour before it works, so you have plenty of time to see my whole performance. (Laughter) Now, I put the laser here, and — now, when I deal the cards in the laser, I know where they are but — yes? Did the camera got it? No? They didn't? What happened? (Audience: It disappeared.) LG: OK, I'll take another group. Do the cameras see the cards now? No? (Audience: No, they're all gone.) LG: But you see the hand. Ah, good, good, good. But now. So now, that was the reason, right? You see the cards? Yes. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Now — (Laughter) — one guy laughed. So now, to find the queen, do it this way: take back the other one, take back the queen. (Laughter) Yeah, interesting, but a little dangerous. (Laughter) I liked it. Now, a little more difficult. Name — anyone, name, please, any suit. (Audience: Spades.) LG: Spades? Spades, good. So here, here I have to peek, lots of cards. I think there are lots of — I don't know how many — but 10, 15 spades in a deck, at least, right? (Laughter) So every time I lift the heap, I peek, right. Then I arrange them so I can get them quick. Perfect, excellent. So I start with the ace — yeah, ace. Ah, yeah — spades? Same mistake as before, right? So — I arrange the spades — the clubs. I try to do this right here. First, I take the spades. You see, I don't work with prestige, so always do mistakes. It doesn't matter to me. And now and then, I get some extra sympathy points, right? One, two, three, four — yes, the camera got it? Five, six, seven, eight — ah — nine, 10, the jack, jack of spades, queen of — I like that laugh, yeah! Good. Queen. (Laughter) Wait, wait, wait — please take any card. Grab any one. Quick, quick, good. And we switch this to the king. Ace of diamonds. And now, look, ace of diamonds will guide. So I find ... king of spades. There was the place. And here is king of spades, correct? Yeah? OK. (Applause) Now, a little more difficult thing. Maybe you think I have the cards in order already, so you help me to shuffle again. Another suit, please. (Audience: Armani.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Armani.) (Laughter) LG: It was after the blindfold. I like this guy, yeah. OK. That should be my end effect, but OK. Armani — who said Armani? You? I drop the cards and you — which size? Which size? It's a piece of cake. I like challenges. Which size? (Audience: Extra large.) LG: Extra large, OK. Say stop. (Audience: Stop.) (Laughter) LG: Yeah, Armani. OK. (Applause) Ah, this is tough. OK, a suit. I had clubs before, spades. Another suit. (Audience: Diamonds.) LG: Diamonds, perfect. So, in this case, I try to locate diamonds. I look at the cards, and OK. We try. Yeah. You help me. If I drop the card face up, like this, you reverse it. Zoe: OK. LG: OK, now. Do with both hands, and quick. Yes, good, good. (Laughter) I think we have it now. Yeah, good, good. So here, diamonds, hearts — no, diamonds. Good, good. Stop. Do you see the pattern? No? Now? Yes, yes, OK. I work with pattern. Oh sorry, I dropped one. Maybe it's important — yeah — nine of diamonds, OK. So now — I always ask, why do I put myself in this position? I have to figure out so many outs, when I miss some cards, but I love it. So now, I will do it. I will try to find the diamonds, but I will do it the hard way. It's too easy to do it right away, right? I think I will do it ... blindfolded. At this distance, it works immediately. Aargh! (Laughter) Duct tape. I look — shake the cards, so I don't. Go ahead. Yeah, good. I like the empathy. Empathy. But it was — did you hear? It was women's voice. Hear the guy — yeah, more, more, more. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Yeah. You can take the nostril too, because some guys think — (Laughter) — some guys think I can peek through the nostril, so do more. Go, go. Right? Good. Satisfied? Looks good, like Batman. Ow! (Laughter) No, with dignity and elegance, right? But I like her, yeah. I said, be a little tough. And it was OK. One more? The last. OK. All right. Now you must agree that I'm — I must rely on other senses, right? I work with vibration. So, what was the card? Diamonds. Ah, I memorized hearts. So now I have to improvise again. Maybe I'll stand up. Half. Diamonds — I'll start with ace of diamonds. Just kidding, warming up — king of hearts. (Laughter) And I give you a diamonds, so they — so you put them here, in a nice row, right. And you can see, yeah? Good. Ace of diamonds, yes? Zoe: Yeah. LG: Good. Good. Two — (Applause) — thank you. I never ever miss two. This is interesting. Always I've found two, but the wrong color. Spades, sorry. And the deck is a gift to you after, so let the skepticals here, in this, examine them, right? Remind me. It's a gift. Two — and it was two of spades, right? Sorry, two of diamonds. I'll do it quick now. Three — three of diamonds. Yes! Four — I like challenges, yes. Yeah, good. Chris Anderson: You're peeking. LG: Pardon? CA: You're peeking. You just got to — this is a request from the lady in the back. (Laughter) Okay. Try that. LG: Yeah. Also listen. OK, now. This is maybe a little tough. We will try. Yes? Good? (Laughter) OK. So, how many cards? Five? Zoe: Four. LG: Four. Is five the next card? Zoe: Five of diamonds, yeah. LG: It's not here? Zoe: It's not there. LG: Oh. So here, all the cards are face down — you agree? (Audience: Yes.) LG: Yes? You see that in the screen? And this is face up, and it's not at the bottom here. So next card will be — was it five? Zoe: Five. LG: Yeah — I will reverse it face up here. Yes? Zoe: Yeah. LG: Six — six with the thumb. Seven. Yeah, I do this. I know where it is, because I peeked before and then I do this. Right? Eight. If — and then nine, right? Yeah. Yesterday — the day before yesterday, I was in Vegas, and I used this actually. Nine? Yeah? Correct? No? Yes! Ah, good, good. Ten — once again, I love this Jonny Wayne move. Yeah. Jack — you [unclear] with Jack? Jack of diamonds, correct? (Audience: No.) LG: Yes? And queen! Queen, with misdirection. Misdirection. (Applause) Yeah? And then, king, after exactly five seconds. Yeah. Five. Five seconds. One, two, three, four — mmm! Check it. Yes? CA: King of diamonds. LG: Ah! Good. Oh. Touch me, feel — ah, ah, you know! CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Lennart Green! LG: Okay, thank you.

Dog-friendly dog training

Ian Dunbar

{0: 'Ian Dunbar'}

{0: ['animal behaviorist']}

{0: "Veterinarian, dog trainer and animal behaviorist Ian Dunbar understands our pets' point of view. By training dog owners in proper conduct (as much as he trains the dogs themselves), he hopes to encourage better relationships with dogs -- not to mention their friends and children, too."}

2007-12-03

2008-08-21

EG 2007

en

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

['animals', 'brain', 'children', 'psychology', 'Best of the Web']

{2031: 'Two poems about what dogs think (probably)', 2066: 'Depressed dogs, cats with OCD — what animal madness means for us humans', 325: '"The Dog Song"', 24167: 'How do dogs "see" with their noses?', 37122: 'A brief history of dogs', 23841: 'The difference between classical and operant conditioning'}

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

Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, trainer Ian Dunbar asks us to see the world through the eyes of our beloved dogs. By knowing our pets' perspective, we can build their love and trust. It's a message that resonates well beyond the animal world.

Dogs have interests. They have interest sniffing each other, chasing squirrels. And if we don't make that a reward in training, that will be a distraction. It's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park, and the owner is calling it, and the owner says, you know, "Puppy, come here, come here," and the dog thinks, "Hmm, interesting. I'm sniffing this other dog's rear end, the owner's calling." It's a difficult choice, right? Rear end, owner. Rear end wins. I mean, you lose. You cannot compete with the environment, if you have an adolescent dog's brain. So, when we train, we're always trying to take into account the dog's point of view. Now, I'm here largely because there's kind of a rift in dog training at the moment that — on one side, we have people who think that you train a dog, number one, by making up rules, human rules. We don't take the dog's point of view into account. So the human says, "You're going to act this way, damn it. We're going to force you to act against your will, to bend to our will." Then, number two, we keep these rules a secret from the dog. And then number three, now we can punish the dog for breaking rules he didn't even know existed. So you get a little puppy, he comes. His only crime is he grew. When he was a little puppy, he puts his paws on your leg — you know, isn't that nice? And you go, "Oh, there's a good boy." You bend down, you pat him — you reward him for jumping up. His one mistake is he's a Tibetan mastiff, and a few months later, he weighs, you know, 80 pounds. Every time he jumps up, he gets all sorts of abuse. I mean, it is really very, very scary the abuse that dogs get. So, this whole dominance issue — number one, what we get in dog training is this Mickey-Mouse interpretation of a very complicated social system. And they take this stuff seriously. Male dogs are very serious about a hierarchy, because it prevents physical fights. Of course, female dogs, bitches, on the other hand, have several bitch amendments to male hierarchical rule. The number one is, "I have it, you don't." And what you will find is a very, very low-ranking bitch will quite easily keep a bone away from a high-ranking male. So, we get in dog training this notion of dominances, or of the alpha dog. I'm sure that you've heard this. Dogs get so abused. Dogs, horses and humans — these are the three species which are so abused in life. And the reason is built into their behavior — is to always come back and apologize. Like, "Oh, I'm sorry you had to beat me. I'm really sorry, yes, it's my fault." They are just so beatable, and that's why they get beaten. The poor puppy jumps up, you open the dog book, what does it say? "Hold his front paws, squeeze his front paws, stamp on his hind feet, squirt him in the face with lemon juice, hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper, knee him in the chest, flip him over backwards." Because he grew? And because he's performing a behavior you've trained him to do? This is insanity. I ask owners, "Well, how would you like the dog to greet you?" And people say, "Well, I don't know, to sit, I guess." I said, "Let's teach him to sit." And then we give him a reason for sitting. Because the first stage is basically teaching a dog ESL. I could speak to you and say, "Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey." Go on, something should happen now. Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French. So the first stage in training is to teach the dog ESL, English as a second language. And that's how we use the food lure in the hand, and we use food because we're dealing with owners. My wife doesn't need food — she's a great trainer, much better than I am. I don't need food, but the average owner says, "Puppy, sit." Or they go, "Sit, sit, sit." They're making a hand signal in front of the dog's rectum for some reason, like the dog has a third eye there — it's insane. You know, "Sit, sit." No, we go, "Puppy, sit" — boom, it's got it in six to 10 trials. Then we phase out the food as a lure, and now the dog knows that "sit" means sit, and you can actually communicate to a dog in a perfectly constructed English sentence. "Phoenix, come here, take this, and go to Jamie, please." And I've taught her "Phoenix," "come here," "take this," "go to" and the name of my son, "Jamie." And the dog can take a note, and I've got my own little search-and-rescue dog. He'll find Jamie wherever he is, you know, wherever kids are, crushing rocks by a stream or something, and take him a little message that says, "Hey, dinner's ready. Come in for dinner." So, at this point, the dog knows what we want it to do. Will it do it? Not necessarily, no. As I said, if he's in the park and there's a rear end to sniff, why come to the owner? The dog lives with you, the dog can get you any time. The dog can sniff your butt, if you like, when he wants to. At the moment, he's in the park, and you are competing with smells, and other dogs, and squirrels. So the second stage in training is to teach the dog to want to do what we want him to do, and this is very easy. We use the Premack principle. Basically, we follow a low-frequency behavior — one the dog doesn't want to do — by a high-frequency behavior, commonly known as a behavior problem, or a dog hobby — something the dog does like to do. That will then become a reward for the lower-frequency behavior. So we go, "sit," on the couch; "sit," tummy-rub; "sit," look, I throw a tennis ball; "sit," say hello to that other dog. Yes, we put "sniff butt" on queue. "Sit," sniff butt. So now all of these distractions that worked against training now become rewards that work for training. And what we're doing, in essence, is we're teaching the dog, kind of like — we're letting the dog think that the dog is training us. And I can imagine this dog, you know, speaking through the fence to, say, an Akita, saying, "Wow, my owners, they are so incredibly easy to train. They're like Golden Retrievers. All I have to do is sit, and they do everything. They open doors, they drive my car, they massage me, they will throw tennis balls, they will cook for me and serve the food. It's like, if I just sit, that's my command. Then I have my own personal doorman, chauffeur, masseuse, chef and waiter." And now the dog's really happy. And this, to me, is always what training is. So we really motivate the dog to want to do it, such that the need for punishment seldom comes up. Now we move to phase three, when now — there's times, you know, when daddy knows best. And I have a little sign on my fridge, and it says, "Because I'm the daddy, that's why." Sorry, no more explanation. "I'm the daddy, you're not. Sit." And there's times, for example, if my son's friends leave the door open, the dogs have to know you don't step across this line. This is a life-or-death thing. You leave this, the sanctity of your house, and you could be hit on the street. So some things we have to let the dog know, "You mustn't do this." And so we have to enforce, but without force. People here get very confused about what a punishment is. They think a punishment is something nasty. I bet a lot of you do, right? You think it's something painful, or scary, or nasty. It doesn't have to be. There's several definitions of what a punishment is, but one definition, the most popular, is: a punishment is a stimulus that reduces the immediately preceding behavior, such that it's less likely to occur in the future. It does not have to be nasty, scary or painful. And I would say, if it doesn't have to be, then maybe it shouldn't be. I was working with a very dangerous dog about a year ago. And this was a dog that put both his owners in hospital, plus the brother-in-law, plus the child. And I only agreed to work with it if they promised it would stay in their house, and they never took it outside. The dog is actually euthanized now, but this was a dog I worked with for a while. A lot of the aggression happened around the kitchen, so while I was there — this was on the fourth visit — we did a four and a half hour down-stay, with the dog on his mat. And he was kept there by the owner's calm insistence. When the dog would try to leave the mat, she would say, "Rover, on the mat, on the mat, on the mat." The dog broke his down-stay 22 times in four and a half hours, while she cooked dinner, because we had a lot of aggression related towards food. The breaks got fewer and fewer. You see, the punishment was working. The behavior problem was going away. She never raised her voice. If she did, she would have got bitten. It's not a good dog you shout at. And a lot of my friends train really neat animals, grizzly bears — if you've ever seen a grizzly bear on the telly or in film, then it's a friend of mine who's trained it — killer whales. I love it because it wires you up. How are you going to reprimand a grizzly bear? "Bad bear, bad bear!" Voom! Your head now is 100 yards away, sailing through the air, OK? This is crazy. So, where do we go from here? We want a better way. Dogs deserve better. But for me, the reason for this actually has to do with dogs. It has to do with watching people train puppies, and realizing they have horrendous interaction skills, horrendous relationship skills. Not just with their puppy, but with the rest of the family at class. I mean, my all-time classic is another "come here" one. You see someone in the park — and I'll cover my mic when I say this, because I don't want to wake you up — and there's the owner in the park, and their dog's over here, and they say, "Rover, come here. Rover, come here. Rover, come here, you son of a bitch." The dog says, "I don't think so." (Laughter) I mean, who in their right mind would think that a dog would want to approach them when they're screaming like that? Instead, the dog says, "I know that tone. I know that tone. Previously, when I've approached, I've gotten punished there." I was walking onto a plane — this, for me, was a pivotal moment in my career, and it really cemented what I wanted to do with this whole puppy-training thing, the notion of how to teach puppies in a dog-friendly way to want to do what we want to do, so we don't have to force them. You know, I puppy-train my child. And the seminal moment was, I was getting on a plane in Dallas, and in row two was a father, I presume, and a young boy about five, kicking the back of the chair. "Johnny, don't do that." Kick, kick, kick. "Johnny, don't do that." Kick, kick, kick. I'm standing right here with my bag. The father leans over, grabs him like this and gives him ugly face. And ugly face is this — when you go face-to-face with a puppy or a child, you say, "What are you doing! Now stop it, stop it, stop it!" And I went, "Oh my God, do I do something?" That child has lost everything — that one of the two people he can trust in this world has absolutely pulled the rug from under his feet. And I thought, "Do I tell this jerk to quit it?" I thought, "Ian, stay out of it, stay out of it, you know, walk on." I walked to the back of the plane, I sat down, and a thought came to me. If that had been a dog, I would have laid him out. (Laughter) If he had kicked a dog, I would have punched him out. He kicked a child, grabs the child like this and I let it go. And this is what it's all about. These relationship skills are so easy. I mean, we as humans, our shallowness when we choose a life-mate based on the three Cs — coat color, conformation, cuteness. You know, kind of like a little robot. This is how we go into a relationship, and it's hunky-dory for a year. And then, a little behavior problem comes up. No different from the dog barking. The husband won't clear up his clothes, or the wife's always late for meetings, whatever it is, OK? And it then starts, and we get into this thing, and our personal feedback — there's two things about it. When you watch people interacting with animals or other people, there is very little feedback, it's too infrequent. And when it happens, it's bad, it's nasty. You see it's especially in families, especially with spouses, especially with children, especially with parents. You see it especially in the workplace, especially from boss to employee. It's as if there's some schadenfreude there, that we actually take delight in people getting things wrong, so that we can then moan and groan and bitch at them. And this, I would say, is the biggest human foible that we have. It really is. We take the good for granted, and we moan and groan at the bad. And I think this whole notion of these skills should be taught. You know, calculus is wonderful. When I was a kid, I was a calculus whiz. I don't understand a thing about it now, but I could do it as a kid. Geometry, fantastic. You know, quantum mechanics — these are cool things. But they don't save marriages and they don't raise children. And my look to the future is, and what I want to do with this doggy stuff, is to teach people that you know, your husband's just as easy to train. Probably easier — if you got a Rottie — much easier to train. Your kids are easy to train. All you've got to do is to watch them, to time-sample the behavior, and say, every five minutes, you ask the question, "Is it good, or is it bad?" If it's good, say, "That was really neat, thank you." That is such a powerful training technique. This should be taught in schools. Relationships — how do you negotiate? How you do negotiate with your friend who wants your toy? You know, how to prepare you for your first relationship? How on earth about raising children? We think how we do it — one night in bed, we're pregnant, and then we're raising the most important thing in life, a child. No, this is what should be taught — the good living, the good habits, which are just as hard to break as bad habits. So, that would be my wish to the future. Ah, damn, I wanted to end exactly on time, but I got eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two — so thank you very much. That's my talk, thank you. (Applause)

"The Dog Song"

Nellie McKay

{0: 'Nellie McKay'}

{0: ['singer/songwriter']}

{0: 'Nellie McKay sings, croons, raps, grooves and -- barks? -- to glowing critical acclaim.'}

2008-02-02

2008-08-22

TED2008

en

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

['animals', 'entertainment', 'live music', 'music', 'piano']

{296: '"Mother of Pearl," "If I Had You"', 287: '"Clonie"', 119: '"Black Men Ski"', 2031: 'Two poems about what dogs think (probably)', 328: 'Dog-friendly dog training', 24167: 'How do dogs "see" with their noses?'}

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

Animal fan Nellie McKay sings a sparkling tribute to her dear dog. She suggests we all do the same: "Just go right to the pound/ And find yourself a hound/ And make that doggie proud/ 'cause that's what it's all about."

I’d like to dedicate this next song to Carmelo, who was put to sleep a couple of days ago, because he got too old. But apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed. ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ I'm just a'walking my dog, singing my song, strolling along. ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong. ♫ ♫ My life was lonely and blue. ♫ ♫ Yeah, I was sad as a sailor, ♫ ♫ I was an angry 'un too. ♫ ♫ Then there was you — appeared when I was entangled with youth and fear, ♫ ♫ and nerves jingle jangled, vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up. ♫ ♫ But then I looked in your eyes ♫ ♫ and I was no more a failure. ♫ ♫ You looked so wacky and wise. ♫ ♫ And I said, "Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I'm just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ catching some sun. We can't go wrong." ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, singing our song, strolling along. ♫ ♫ 'Cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don't care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ ♫ 'cause that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ My life was tragic and sad. ♫ ♫ I was the archetypal loser. ♫ ♫ I was a pageant gone bad. ♫ ♫ And then there was you — on time, and wagging your tail ♫ ♫ in the cutest mime that you was in jail. ♫ ♫ I said, "Woof, be mine!" and you gave a wail and then ♫ ♫ I was no longer alone. ♫ ♫ And I was no more a boozer. ♫ ♫ We'll make the happiest home. ♫ ♫ And I said, "Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I’m just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ singing my song, strolling along." ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong, ♫ ♫ 'cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don’t care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ ♫ 'cause that's what it's all about, ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about, ♫ ♫ that's what it's all abou-BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ Good dog! Thank you.

Great piano performances, recreated

John Q. Walker

{0: 'John Q. Walker'}

{0: ['musician and inventor']}

{0: 'Software entrepreneur John Q. Walker uses computers to bring piano legends back to life -- digitally reconstructing their performances from audio tracks and playing them on real instruments, live.'}

2007-12-12

2008-08-26

EG 2007

en

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

['entertainment', 'live music', 'music', 'performance', 'piano', 'technology', 'Best of the Web']

{286: 'The transformative power of classical music', 246: 'Inventing instruments that unlock new music', 14: 'Software (as) art', 1808: 'In the key of genius', 218: 'The untouchable music of the theremin', 23936: 'How to read music'}

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

Imagine hearing great, departed pianists play again today, just as they would in person. John Q. Walker demonstrates how recordings can be analyzed for precise keystrokes and pedal motions, then played back on computer-controlled grand pianos.

Ninety-nine percent of us have the dream of listeners. Not being the musicians — the listeners, right? And we crave one thing, even though we kind of don't know it all the time. We crave to be in the room with the musician the day it was recorded, the day it was played. And we go to live concerts, and we get that as much as we can. But then we listen to the other 99 percent of our stuff recorded. And it turns out the further back you go in history, the little rougher it sounds. And so we said, there's a solution to this. Let's separate the performance, as a thing, out from the recording, which was how it was made. You know, the thing with microphones in the room and all that day. But the performance itself was how the musicians worked their fingers, and what instruments they were using. And it's the data hidden inside the recording. In order to do this, it's a lot of hardware and software that runs in a very high resolution. And Yamaha makes an incredible thing called the Disklavier Pro that looks like a nice grand piano there. And you probably didn't realize it's going to do all these things — but full of solenoids, and fiber optics, and computers and all this kind of stuff. The highest resolution out of Japan. And this just didn't work until we could cross this line that says high-definition. And we were able to cross this line, called the uncanny valley, in terms of — artificial intelligence terms. We have a process where we, you know, kind of put it into the computer and digitize it, and then a whole lot of analysis. And we look at every single note, and all the attributes of those notes: how hard they were struck, and how they were held down, and how you move the fingers. So we had to develop a whole new science of how you move your fingers. And, you know, it's a thing your piano teacher teaches you, but we never had a science behind these kinds of things. I'm going to start with Glenn Gould. He died 25 years ago this year, and was born 75 years ago this year. Was a beloved pianist, maybe the great cult pianist of the twentieth century. He just got tired of being in front of an audience, and felt like — a performing monkey was, in fact, his term. So he stepped back, and did nothing but the crafting of his work. And Gould's specialty was playing Bach. His maybe most famous recording was something called "The Goldberg Variations." Bach only wrote themes and variations one time. He wrote some early pieces, but late in his life, in his mature period, he said, "Here's a theme — 30 variations." In fact, the theme isn't even the melody, it's the bass line. And Gould recorded it in two major recordings that you may know about, one in mono, and one in stereo. And the one in mono, by the way, he used the pedal, and as he got older, he said, "No, no, wait a minute. I'm going to get very scientific about this, and not use the pedal." What I'd like you to hear live is the 1955 version, and we'll play the first couple pieces of it. Glenn Gould, 1955. (Music) How about that? (Applause) So let me tell you a little bit how this was done. First of all, let me get you to the end step. This is — we have a fairly complex process that, you know, software and musicians and so on, but when we're all done, we know that the ear is the final arbiter. We can play the original in one ear, and a new recording in the other. So I'm going to do this for you right now, what you just heard. And in the right speaker is going to be the original recording, and the left speaker is going to be the new recording, actually of an instrument just like that one, and I'm going to play them together at the same time. (Music) That's the original. [Unclear] That's the two together. (Music) Before "Jurassic Park," there was no science for how skin hung off of muscle, right? So, in the video world, we've been able to invent, in our lifetimes, natural behavior. And this is kind of another example of putting a science behind natural behavior. And then you heard the original. Ultimately, I started with the experience. And the experience is: I want to be in the room and hear the musicians. Lots of you can afford to buy one of these. But, if not, there is now high-definition surround sound. And I got to tell you, if you haven't heard high-definition surround, go down to your audio dealer, your audiophile dealer. It's so involving compared to regular stereo. But if you don't have that, maybe you can listen on your headphones. And so on the same disk we have five recordings — Sony has five recordings. And you could listen in headphones with this thing called binaural recording. And it's a dummy head that sits in front of the instrument, and it's got microphones where the ears are. And when you put on headphones, and you listen to this, you're inside of Glenn Gould's body. And it is a chuckle until, you know, the musicians, who are musicians who play the piano, listen to this, say, "I can't believe it! It's just what it's like to play the piano." Except now you're inside Glenn Gould's body playing the piano, and it feels like your fingers are making the decisions and moving through the whole process. It's a game changer. Here's now something we know in spectacular quality. The whole process is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. What you heard today was not perfect. It's an amalgam of wood, and cast iron, and felt, and steel strings, and all these, and they're all amazingly sensitive to temperature and humidity. So when you go into the recording session, you get to stop after every piece and rebuild the piano if you need to. There's the whole action there, sitting, kind of, on the side, and the dummy head and our recording engineers standing around while we rebuild the piano. Without putting dates next to these things, step-by-step music will be turned into data, like every field that's occurred in the past 35 or 40 years. Audio has come very late to this game — I'm not talking about digitizing, and bits, and re-mastering. I'm talking about turn it into the data that it was made from, which is how it was performed. And audio came very late because our ears are so hard to fool — they're high-resolution, and they're wired straight to our emotions, and you can't trick them very easily. Your eyes are pretty happy with some color and movement, you know. All right, there's this episode of "Star Trek." (Laughter) I get it — it was all just laid in for me yesterday there. The episode of "Star Trek" for me was James Daly played Methuselah — remember this one? And at some point he's dancing with his — and I won't ruin the episode for you, from 1967. Right, do you know where I'm going? And Nimoy, I'm sorry, Spock sits down at the piano, and he starts playing this Brahms waltz, and they all dance to it. And then Spock turns round, he goes, "James, I know all of the Brahms waltzes, and I don't believe this is one of them in the category." That's where I'm at. I want to hear the waltzes Brahms didn't write. I want to hear the pieces that Horowitz didn't play. But I believe we're on a path now, when we get to data, that we can distill styles, and templates, and formulas, and all these kinds of things, again, that you've seen happen in the computer graphics world. It's now coming in this world. The transition will be this one. It says right now, we think music is notes and how they're played. And I believe this is coming. Because what you've just heard was a computer playing data — no Glenn Gould in the room. But yet, it was human. And I believe you'll get to the next step, the real dream of listeners. Every time you listen to a recording today, every time you take out your iPod and whatever, every time you listen to it, it's the same thing — it's frozen. Wouldn't it be cool if every time you listened, it could be different? This morning, you're sadder, you want to hear your song, the same song, played sadder than you did yesterday. You want to hear it played by different musicians. You want to hear it in different rooms and whatever. We've seen all these "Star Treks," and they're all holodeck episodes as well. Every time I listen to that, I get goose bumps. It's so amazing, it's so exciting. Every time I listen to that recording it's like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm in the same room. I can't believe this is happening." It's a way better experience than whatever you're used to listening to, in whatever form. And lastly, I will wrap up with one minute of Art Tatum. So I've really overshot my budget here. We made a new recording of him playing in the Shrine Auditorium in September. It was a concert he recorded in the Shrine Auditorium in 1949. And I've got to tell you, we have this lab where we build and measure everything, back in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we flew out to Los Angeles. And as the president of the company, I didn't feel real comfortable about where we were. That's a real uncomfortable feeling, when all the equipment's come out and a whole Sony team, and people are going to be sitting there in the audience. And we put the piano on the sweet spot of the stage in the Shrine, which has not changed since 1949, still seats 6,000 people. And on the sweet spot on the stage, Tatum starts playing ... and every note, every beat, every slur, every accent, every pedal was perfect, because he played it for that room on that day. And we captured all that data all over again. And I want you to hear that right now. And fortunately, it's right in here. This is an encore he used to do. It's one minute long. It's an Irish jig, and I want you to hear his humor. (Music) (Applause) And that's just what the live audience did. (Applause) So thank you very much, Michael, thank you for the opportunity.

Kids can teach themselves

Sugata Mitra

{0: 'Sugata Mitra'}

{0: ['education researcher']}

{0: 'Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize. His wish: Build a School in the Cloud, where children can explore and learn from one another.'}

2007-02-02

2008-08-27

LIFT 2007

en

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

['children', 'cities', 'culture', 'education', 'global issues', 'teaching', 'Best of the Web']

{1678: 'Build a School in the Cloud', 66: 'Do schools kill creativity?', 949: 'The child-driven education', 892: 'Education innovation in the slums', 809: 'Teaching one child at a time', 423: 'Taking OLPC to Colombia'}

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

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

I have a tough job to do. You know, when I looked at the profile of the audience here, with their connotations and design, in all its forms, and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks, and so on, that I wanted to tell you, I wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context. In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas — it's like four pieces of a puzzle. And if I succeed in doing that, maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on, and perhaps help me do my work. The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education. Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things. Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas. What happens to education? The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them. What happens to education in that context? So keep both of those ideas of remoteness. We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers. If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers. They do not have good enough infrastructure. And if they had some infrastructure, they have difficulty maintaining it. But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph. The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully. I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it. But it was quite obvious, quite clear, that for this particular route that I had taken, the remoter the school was, the worse its results seemed to be. That seemed a little damning, and I tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure, or with the availability of electricity, and things like that. To my surprise, it did not correlate. It did not correlate with the size of classrooms. It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure. It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate. But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers — which was, "Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area?" — 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi — because, you know, those are relatively better off areas — and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes. I would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that, I wish I was in some other school, probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results. So it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools, as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat, and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing. It appears that way. When you take education and technology, then I find in the literature that, you know, things like websites, collaborative environments — you've been listening to all that in the morning — it's always piloted first in the best schools, the best urban schools, and, according to me, biases the result. The literature — one part of it, the scientific literature — consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing. The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does. Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do. You put in this new super-duper technology, and now they get 83 percent. So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it. If you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools, where the score was 30 percent, and, let's say, took that up to 40 percent — that will be a completely different thing. So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about. So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach the underprivileged first, not the other way about. And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception? Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine — it's impossible. I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible — I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine, should be. So, you know, it puts the teacher into a tough bind, you have to think. Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason. If you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies, then you don't need an alternative education. So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools. There are such areas, but — anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else. I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like. They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments. I'll have to really rush through this. They're a set of experiments. The first one was done in New Delhi in 1999. And what we did over there was pretty much simple. I had an office in those days which bordered a slum, an urban slum, so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum. They cut a hole inside that wall — which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall — and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com — in those days — and just left it there. And this is what we saw. So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall. About eight hours later, we found this kid. To the right is this eight-year-old child who — and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall. And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse. So it sort of raised more questions than it answered. Is this real? Does the language matter, because he's not supposed to know English? Will the computer last, or will they break it and steal it — and did anyone teach them? The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him. So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it, this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything. (Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout. He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad. Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen — and later on he told me, "I have never seen a television where you can do something." So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television. And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad — you'll see him do that. He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page. Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth. When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here. And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing. So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there. So we thought that this is what was happening: that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances? At this time there was a — the main question was about English. People said, you know, you really ought to have this in Indian languages. So I said, have what, shall I translate the Internet into some Indian language? That's not possible. So, it has to be the other way about. But let's see, how do the children tackle the English language? I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. And I built a similar hole-in-the-wall. One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk. In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away. I left the computer there with lots of CDs — I didn't have any Internet — and came back three months later. So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse." (Laughter) I was real surprised. You know, how on earth did they know all this? And they said, "Well, we've picked it up from the CDs." So I said, "But how did you understand what's going on over there?" So they said, "Well, you've left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English." So then I measured, and they were using 200 English words with each other — mispronounced, but correct usage — words like exit, stop, find, save, that kind of thing, not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations. So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to. Finally, I got some funding to try this experiment out to see if these results are replicable, if they happen everywhere else. India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the — you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities. So, I could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world. So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India. This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold. I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on. This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border. And you see here a little clip of — one of these villages — the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet. Then to central India — very warm, moist, fishing villages, where humidity is a very big killer of electronics. So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running. I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again. This sequence is also nice. This is a small child, a six-year-old, telling his eldest sister what to do. And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones. What did we find? We found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct in a connected environment, irrespective of anything that we could measure. So if they have access to the computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. I couldn't find a single correlation with anything, but it had to be in groups. And that may be of great, you know, interest to this group, because all of you are talking about groups. So here was the power of what a group of children can do, if you lift the adult intervention. Just a quick idea of the measurements. We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that. But we got a clean learning curve, almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school. I'll leave it at that, because, I mean, it sort of says it all, doesn't it? What could they learn to do? Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video. In short, what all of us do. And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer. So, how do they do that? If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that's not how it's happening. What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about 16 children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing. It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle. So what does the eight-year-old do? He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched. And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic. So, they seem to be able to acquire very quickly. So what was the conclusion over the six years of work? It was that primary education can happen on its own, or parts of it can happen on its own. It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective. The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them — I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions. We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know. I simply took those questions where I got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes — so I was able to get a collection of 16 such statements. These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no. A typical example being, "Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies." They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do. So I leave you with this third question. Can technology alter the acquisition of values? Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it. Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies — except for the debate about an intelligent designer. But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization. But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency. And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems. So here are my four sentences then. Remoteness affects the quality of education. Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later. Values are acquired; doctrine and dogma are imposed — the two opposing mechanisms. And learning is most likely a self-organizing system. If you put all the four together, then it gives — according to me — it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology. An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized. As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it. PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations. We borrowed it. Video conferencing. The personal computer itself. I think it's time that the educationists made their own specs, and I have such a set of specs. This is a brief look at that. And such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness, values and violence. So I thought I'd give it a name — why don't we call it "outdoctrination." And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future? So I want to leave that as a thought with you. Thank you. (Applause)

How I became an activist

Ory Okolloh

{0: 'Ory Okolloh'}

{0: ['blogger and activist']}

{0: "Ory Okolloh maintains the blog Mzalendo, providing an unprecedented look at the doings of Kenya's parliament -- information once unavailable to Kenyan citizens."}

2007-06-06

2008-08-28

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'activism', 'global issues', 'identity', 'media', 'technology']

{127: 'Want to help Africa? Do business here', 185: 'A commodities exchange for Ethiopia', 156: 'How to educate leaders? Liberal arts', 59: 'My wish: Three actions for Africa', 232: 'My wish: Find the next Einstein in Africa', 152: 'Aid versus trade'}

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

Ory Okolloh tells the story of her life and her family -- and how she came to do her heroic work reporting on the doings of Kenya's parliament.

So what's image got do with it? And I must say, I think Emeka is trying to send a lot of subliminal messages, because I'm going to keep harping on some of the issues that have come up. But I'm going to try and do something different, and try and just close the loop with some of my personal stories, and try and put a face to a lot of the issues that we've been talking about. So, Africa is a complex continent full of contradictions, as you can see. We're not the only ones. (Laughter) (Applause) And you know, it's amazing. I mean, we need a whole conference just devoted to telling the good stories about the continent. Just think about that, you know? And this is typically what we've been talking about, the role that the media plays in focusing just on the negative stuff. Now, why is that a problem? A typical disaster story: disease, corruption, poverty. And some of you might be standing here thinking, saying, "OK, you know, Ory, you're Harvard-educated, and all you privileged people come here, saying, 'Forget the poor people. Let's focus on business and the markets, and whatever.' " And they're all, "There's the 80 percent of Africans who really need help." And I want to tell you that this is my story, OK? And it's the story of many of the Africans who are here. We start with poverty. I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money, or being able to support family. Euvin was talking about bellwether signs. The bellwether for whether our family was broke or not was breakfast. You know, when things were good, we had eggs and sausages. When things were bad, we had porridge. And like many African families, my parents could never save because they supported siblings, cousins, you know, their parents, and things were always dicey. Now, when I was born, they realized they had a pretty smart kid, and they didn't want me to go to the neighborhood school, which was free. And they adopted a very interesting approach to education, which was they were going to take me to a school that they can barely afford. So they took me to a private, Catholic, elementary school, which set the foundation for what ended up being my career. And what happened was, because they could afford it sometimes, sometimes not, I got kicked out pretty much every term. You know, someone would come in with a list of the people who haven't paid school fees, and when they started getting pretty strict, you had to leave, until your school fees could be paid. And I remember thinking, I mean, why don't these guys just take me to a cheap school? Because you know, as a kid you're embarrassed and you're sensitive, and everyone knows you guys don't have money. But they kept at it, and I now understand why they did what they did. They talk about corruption. In Kenya, we have an entrance exam to go into high school. And there's national schools, which are like the best schools, and provincial schools. My dream school at that time was Kenya High School, a national school. I missed the cutoff by one point. And I was so disappointed, and I was like, "Oh my God, you know, what am I going to do?" And my father said, "OK, listen. Let's go and try and talk to the headmistress. You know, it's just one point. I mean, maybe she'll let you in if that slot's still there." So we went to the school, and because we were nobodies, and because we didn't have privilege, and because my father didn't have the right last name, he was treated like dirt. And I sat and listened to the headmistress talk to him, saying, you know, who do you think you are? And, you know, you must be joking if you think you can get a slot. And I had gone to school with other girls, who were kids of politicians, and who had done much, much worse than I did, and they had slots there. And there's nothing worse than seeing your parent being humiliated in front of you, you know? And we left, and I swore to myself, and I was like, "I'm never, ever going to have to beg for anything in my life." They called me two weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you can come now. And I told them to stuff it. (Laughter) (Applause) Final story, and I sort of have to speak quickly. Disease. My father, who I've been talking about, died of AIDS in 1999. He never told anyone that he had AIDS, his fear of the stigma was so strong. And I'm pretty much the one who figured it out, because I was a nerd. And I was in the States at the time, and they called me. He was very sick, the first time he got sick. And he had Cryptococcal meningitis. And so I went on to Google, Cryptococcal meningitis, you know. Because of doctor-patient privilege, they couldn't really tell us what was going on. But they were like, you know, this is a long-term thing. And when I went online and looked at the infectious — read about the disease, I pretty much realized what was going on. The first time he got sick, he recovered. But what happened was that he had to be on medication that, at that time — Diflucan, which in the States is used for yeast infections — cost 30 dollars a pill. He had to be on that pill for the rest of his life. You know, so money ran out. He got sick again. And up until that time, he had a friend who used to travel to India, and he used to import, bring him, could get him a generic version of it. And that kept him going. But the money ran out. He got sick again. He got sick on a Friday. At that time, there was only one bank that had ATMs in Kenya, and we could not get cash. The family couldn't get cash for him to start the treatment until Monday. The hospital put him on a water drip for three days. And finally, we figured, well, OK, we'd better just try and take him to a public hospital. At least he'll get treated while we try to figure out the money situation. And he died when the ambulance was coming to the hospital to take him. And, you know, now, imagine if — and I could go on and on — imagine if this is all you know about me. How would you look at me? With pity, you know. Sadness. And this is how you look at Africa. This is the damage it causes. You don't see the other side of me. You don't see the blogger, you don't see the Harvard-educated lawyer, the vibrant person, you know? And I just wanted to personalize that. Because we talk about it in big terms, and you wonder, you know, so what? But it's damaging. And I'm not unique, right? Imagine if all you knew about William was the fact that he grew up in a poor village. And you didn't know about the windmill, you know? And I was just moved. I was actually crying during his presentation. He was like, I try and I make. I was like Nike should hire him, you know, "Just do it!" (Laughter) And this is, again, the point I'm trying to make. When you focus just on the disasters — (Laughter) (Applause) — we're ignoring the potential. So, what is to be done? First of all, Africans, we need to get better at telling our stories. We heard about that yesterday. We had some of them this morning. And this is an example, you know, blogging is one way of doing that. Afrigator is an aggregator of African blogs that was developed in South Africa. So we need to start getting better. If no one else will tell our stories, let's do it. And going back to the point I was trying to make, this is the Swahili Wikipedia. Swahili is spoken by about 50 million people in East Africa. It only has five contributors. Four of them are white males — non-native speakers. The other person is — Ndesanjo, if you're here, stand up — is a Tanzanian, [the] first Swahili blogger. He's the only African who's contributing to this. People, please. We can't whine and complain the West is doing this. What are we doing? Where are the rest of the Swahili speakers? Why are we not generating our own content? You know, it's not enough to complain. We need to act. Reuters now integrates African blogs into their coverage of Africa. So, that's a start, and we've heard of all their other initiatives. The cheetah generation. The aid approach, you know, is flawed. And after all the hoopla of Live 8, we're still not anywhere in the picture. No, you're not. (Laughter) But the point I'm trying to make, though, is that it's not enough for us to criticize. And for those of you in the diaspora who are struggling with where should I be, should I move back, should I stay? You know, just jump. The continent needs you. And I can't emphasize that enough, you know. I walked away from a job with one of the top firms in D.C., Covington and Burling, six figures. With two paychecks, or three paychecks, I could solve a lot of my family's problems. But I walked away from that, because my passion was here, and because I wanted to do things that were fulfilling. And because I'm needed here, you know? I probably can win a prize for the most ways to use a Harvard Law School degree because of all the things I'm doing. One is because I'm pretty aggressive, and I try and find, you know, opportunities. But there is such a need, you know? I'm a corporate lawyer most of the time for an organization called Enablis that supports entrepreneurs in South Africa. We're now moving into East Africa. And we give them business development services, as well as financing loan and equity. I've also set up a project in Kenya, and what we do is we track the performance of Kenyan MPs. My partner, M, who's a tech guru, hacked WordPress. It costs us, like, 20 dollars a month just for hosting. Everything else on there is a labor of love. We've manually entered all the data there. And you can get profiles of each MP, questions they've asked in parliament. We have a comment function, where people can ask their MPs questions. There are some MPs who participate, and come back and ask. And basically, we started this because we were tired of complaining about our politicians. You know, I believe that accountability stems from demand. You're not just going to be accountable out of the goodness of your heart. And we as Africans need to start challenging our leaders. What are they doing? You know, they're not going to change just out of nowhere. So we need new policies, we need — where's that coming from, you know? Another thing is that these leaders are a reflection of our society. We talk about African governments like they've been dropped from Mars, you know? They come from us. And what is it about our society that is generating leaders that we don't like? And how can we change that? So Mzalendo was one small way we thought we could start inspiring people to start holding their leaders accountable. Where do we go from here? I believe in the power of ideas. I believe in the power of sharing knowledge. And I'd ask all of you, when you leave here, please just share, and keep the ideas that you've gotten out of here going, because it can make a difference. The other thing I want to urge you to do is take an interest in the individual. I've had lots of conversations about things I think need to be happening in Africa. People are like, "OK, if you don't do aid, I'm a bleeding heart liberal, what can I do?" And when I talk about my ideas, they're like, "BBut it's not scalable, you know. Give me something I can do with Paypal." It's not that easy, you know? And sometimes just taking an interest in the individual, in the fellows you've met, and the businesspeople you've met, it can make a huge difference, especially in Africa, because usually the individual in Africa carries a lot of people behind them. Practically. I mean, when I was a first-year student in law school, my mom's business had collapsed, so I was supporting her. My sister was struggling to get through undergrad. I was helping her pay her tuition. My cousin ran out of school fees, and she's really smart. I was paying her school fees. A cousin of mine died of AIDS, left an orphan, so we said, well, what are we going to do with her? You know, she's now my baby sister. And because of the opportunities that were afforded to me, I am able to lift all those people. So, don't underestimate that. An example. This man changed my life. He's a professor. He's now at Vanderbilt. He's an undergrad professor, Mitchell Seligson. And because of him, I got into Harvard Law School, because he took an interest. I was taking a class of his, and he was just like, this is an overeager student, which we don't normally get in the United States, because everyone else is cynical and jaded. He called me to his office and said, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I said, "I want to be a lawyer." And he was like, "Why? You know, we don't need another lawyer in the United States." And he tried to talk me out of it, but it was like, "OK, I know nothing about applying to law school, I'm poli-sci Ph.D. But, you know, let's figure out what I need you to do, what I need to do to help you out." It was like, "Where do you want to go?" And to me at that time university — I was at University of Pitts for undergrad, and that was like heaven, OK, because compared to what could have been in Kenya. So I'm like, "Yeah, I'm just applying to Pitt for law school." He was like, "Why? You know, you're smart, you have all these things going for you." And I'm like, "Because I'm here and it's cheap, and you know, I kind of like Pittsburgh." Like, that's the dumbest reason I've ever heard for applying to law school. And, you know, so he took me under his wing, and he encouraged me. And he said, "Look, you can get into Harvard, you're that good, OK? And if they don't admit you, they're the ones who are messed up." And he built me up, you know? And this is just an illustration. You can meet other individuals here. We just need a push. That's all I needed was a push to go to the next level. Basically, I want to end with my vision for Africa, you know? A gentleman spoke yesterday about the indignity of us having to leave the continent so that we can fulfill our potential. You know, my vision is that my daughter, and any other African child being born today, can be whoever they want to be here, without having to leave. And they can have the possibility of transcending the circumstances under which they were born. That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are. For most Africans today, where you live, or where you were born, and the circumstances under which you were born, determine the rest of your life. I would like to see that change, and the change starts with us. And as Africans, we need to take responsibility for our continent. Thank you. (Applause)

A talking, squawking parrot

Einstein the Parrot

{0: 'Einstein the Parrot'}

{0: ['african grey parrot']}

{0: 'Einstein, the African grey parrot, has a vocabulary of more than 200 words and sounds; she can perform nearly half on cue. '}

2006-02-02

2008-08-29

TED2006

en

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

['animals', 'education', 'entertainment', 'performance']

{206: 'Underwater astonishments', 76: 'The gentle genius of bonobos', 77: 'The shrimp with a kick!', 2770: 'On tennis, love and motherhood', 31630: 'A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity', 477: 'Learning from dirty jobs'}

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

This whimsical wrap-up of TED2006 -- presented by Einstein, the African grey parrot, and her trainer, Stephanie White -- simply tickles. Watch for the moment when Einstein has a moment with Al Gore.

Stephanie White: I'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody. Can you tell everybody your name? Einstein: Einstein. SW: This is Einstein. Can you tell everyone "hi"? E: Hello. SW: That's nice. Can you be polite? E: Hi, sweetheart. SW: Much better. Well, Einstein is very honored to be here at TED 2006, amongst all you modern-day Einsteins. In fact, she's very excited. E: Woo. SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Since we've arrived, there's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference. This morning we've heard a lot of whispers about Tom O'Reilly's wrap-up on Saturday. Einstein, did you hear whispers? E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Einstein's especially interested in Penelope's talk. A lot of her research goes on in case, which can get pretty dusty. E: Achoo! SW: It could make her sneeze. But more importantly, her research could help Einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat. Einstein: [Coughs] SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level. Well, that's really cool, but what Einstein's really hoping is that maybe he'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut. E: Oh, my God! My God! My God! SW: Yeah. She would get really, really excited. (Laughter) That is one big peanut. Since Einstein is a bird, she's very interested in things that fly. She thinks Burt Rutan is very impressive. E: Ooh. SW: Yeah. She especially likes his latest achievement, SpaceShipOne. Einstein, would you like to ride in Burt's spaceship? E: [Spaceship noise] SW: Even if it doesn't have a laser? E: [Laser noise] (Laughter) SW: Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny, Einstein. Now, Einstein also thinks, you know, working in caves and travelling through space — it's all very dangerous jobs. It would be very dangerous if you fell down. E: Wheeeeeee! [Splat] SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Little splat at the end there. Einstein, did that hurt? E: Ow, ow, ow. SW: Yeah. It's all a lot of hard work. E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. It can get a bird like Einstein frustrated. E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah, it sure can. But when Einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public she loves to take in the arts. If the children of the Uganda need another dance partner, Einstein could sure fit the bill, because she loves to dance. Can you get down? E: [Bobbing head] (Laughter) SW: Let's get down for everybody. Come on now. She's going to make me do it, too. Ooh, ooh. Einstein: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. SW: Do your head now. E: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. (Laughter) SW: Or maybe Sirena Huang would like to learn some arias on her violin, and Einstein can sing along with some opera? E: [Operatic squawk] SW: Very good. (Laughter) Or maybe Stu just needs another backup singer? Einstein, can you also sing? I know, you need to get rid of that seed first. Can you sing? E: La, la. SW: There you go. And, of course, if all else fails, she can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta. E: [Squawks] SW: All right. Well, Einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier, but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem. E: What's the matter? SW: No, I don't have a problem. You have the problem, remember? You were saying that you were really embarrassed, because you're in love with a pirate? E: Yar. SW: There we go. And what do pirates like to drink? E: Beer. SW: Yeah, that's right. But you don't like to drink beer, Einstein. You like to drink water. E: [Water sound] SW: Very good. Now, really, she is pretty nervous. Because one of her favorite folks from back home is here, and she's pretty nervous to meet him. She thinks Al Gore is a really good-looking man. What do you say to a good-looking man? E: Hey, baby. (Laughter) SW: And so do all the folks back home in Tennessee. E: Yee haw. (Laughter) SW: And since she's such a big fan, she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of March. And we didn't think he'd be in town then, so Einstein wanted to do something special for him. So let's see if Einstein will sing "Happy Birthday" to Al Gore. Can you sing "Happy Birthday" to him? E: Happy birthday to you. SW: Again. E: Happy birthday to you. SW: Again. E: Happy birthday to you. SW: Big finish. E: Happy birthday to you. SW: Good job! (Applause) Well, before we wrap it up, she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the Knoxville Zoo. Einstein, do you want to say "hi" to all the owls? E: Woo, woo, woo. SW: What about the other birds? E: Tweet, tweet, tweet. SW: And the penguin? E: Quack, quack, quack. SW: There we go. (Laughter) Let's get that one out of there. How about a chimpanzee? E: Ooh, ooh, ooh. Aah, aah, aah. SW: Very good. (Laughter) What about a wolf? E: Ooooowww. SW: And a pig? E: Oink, oink, oink. SW: And the rooster? E: Cock-a-doodle-doo! SW: And how about those cats? E: Meow. (Laughter) SW: At the zoo we have big cats from the jungle. E: Grrrrr. (Laughter) SW: What about a skunk? E: Stinker. (Laughter) SW: She's a comedian. I suppose you think you're famous? Are you famous? E: Superstar. SW: Yeah. You are a superstar. (Laughter) Well, we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect Einstein's animal friends, and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live [in]. Now, Einstein does say it best when we ask her. Why do we want to protect your home? E: I'm special. SW: You are very special. What would you like to say to all these nice people? E: I love you. SW: That's good. Can you blow them a kiss? E: [Kissing noise] SW: And what do you say when it's time to go? E: Goodbye. SW: Good job. Thank you all. (Applause)

DNA folding, in detail

Paul Rothemund

{0: 'Paul Rothemund'}

{0: ['dna origamist']}

{0: 'Paul Rothemund folds DNA into shapes and patterns. Which is a simple enough thing to say, but the process he has developed has vast implications for computing and manufacturing -- allowing us to create things we can now only dream of.'}

2008-02-02

2008-09-02

TED2008

en

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

['DNA', 'MacArthur grant', 'creativity', 'nanoscale', 'physics', 'science', 'technology']

{147: 'Visualizing the wonder of a living cell', 35: 'How we discovered DNA', 227: 'On the verge of creating synthetic life', 183: 'Playing with DNA that self-assembles', 1322: 'Animations of unseeable biology', 2570: 'The era of personal DNA testing is here'}

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

In 2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of his specialty, DNA folding. Now he lays out in clear, abundant detail the immense promise of this field -- to create tiny machines that assemble themselves.

So, people argue vigorously about the definition of life. They ask if it should have reproduction in it, or metabolism, or evolution. And I don't know the answer to that, so I'm not going to tell you. I will say that life involves computation. So this is a computer program. Booted up in a cell, the program would execute, and it could result in this person; or with a small change, it could result in this person; or another small change, this person; or with a larger change, this dog, or this tree, or this whale. So now, if you take this metaphor [of] genome as program seriously, you have to consider that Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact, as is Jim Watson, Craig Venter, as are all of us. And in convincing yourself that this metaphor is true, there are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs that could help to convince you. But one, to me, that's most compelling is the peculiar sensitivity to small changes that can make large changes in biological development — the output. A small mutation can take a two-wing fly and make it a four-wing fly. Or it could take a fly and put legs where its antennae should be. Or if you're familiar with "The Princess Bride," it could create a six-fingered man. Now, a hallmark of computer programs is just this kind of sensitivity to small changes. If your bank account's one dollar, and you flip a single bit, you could end up with a thousand dollars. So these small changes are things that I think that — they indicate to us that a complicated computation in development is underlying these amplified, large changes. So now, all of this indicates that there are molecular programs underlying biology, and it shows the power of molecular programs — biology does. And what I want to do is write molecular programs, potentially to build technology. And there are a lot of people doing this, a lot of synthetic biologists doing this, like Craig Venter. And they concentrate on using cells. They're cell-oriented. So my friends, molecular programmers, and I have a sort of biomolecule-centric approach. We're interested in using DNA, RNA and protein, and building new languages for building things from the bottom up, using biomolecules, potentially having nothing to do with biology. So, these are all the machines in a cell. There's a camera. There's the solar panels of the cell, some switches that turn your genes on and off, the girders of the cell, motors that move your muscles. My little group of molecular programmers are trying to refashion all of these parts from DNA. We're not DNA zealots, but DNA is the cheapest, easiest to understand and easy to program material to do this. And as other things become easier to use — maybe protein — we'll work with those. If we succeed, what will molecular programming look like? You're going to sit in front of your computer. You're going to design something like a cell phone, and in a high-level language, you'll describe that cell phone. Then you're going to have a compiler that's going to take that description and it's going to turn it into actual molecules that can be sent to a synthesizer and that synthesizer will pack those molecules into a seed. And what happens if you water and feed that seed appropriately, is it will do a developmental computation, a molecular computation, and it'll build an electronic computer. And if I haven't revealed my prejudices already, I think that life has been about molecular computers building electrochemical computers, building electronic computers, which together with electrochemical computers will build new molecular computers, which will build new electronic computers, and so forth. And if you buy all of this, and you think life is about computation, as I do, then you look at big questions through the eyes of a computer scientist. So one big question is, how does a baby know when to stop growing? And for molecular programming, the question is how does your cell phone know when to stop growing? (Laughter) Or how does a computer program know when to stop running? Or more to the point, how do you know if a program will ever stop? There are other questions like this, too. One of them is Craig Venter's question. Turns out I think he's actually a computer scientist. He asked, how big is the minimal genome that will give me a functioning microorganism? How few genes can I use? This is exactly analogous to the question, what's the smallest program I can write that will act exactly like Microsoft Word? (Laughter) And just as he's writing, you know, bacteria that will be smaller, he's writing genomes that will work, we could write smaller programs that would do what Microsoft Word does. But for molecular programming, our question is, how many molecules do we need to put in that seed to get a cell phone? What's the smallest number we can get away with? Now, these are big questions in computer science. These are all complexity questions, and computer science tells us that these are very hard questions. Almost — many of them are impossible. But for some tasks, we can start to answer them. So, I'm going to start asking those questions for the DNA structures I'm going to talk about next. So, this is normal DNA, what you think of as normal DNA. It's double-stranded, it's a double helix, has the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that pair to hold the strands together. And I'm going to draw it like this sometimes, just so I don't scare you. We want to look at individual strands and not think about the double helix. When we synthesize it, it comes single-stranded, so we can take the blue strand in one tube and make an orange strand in the other tube, and they're floppy when they're single-stranded. You mix them together and they make a rigid double helix. Now for the last 25 years, Ned Seeman and a bunch of his descendants have worked very hard and made beautiful three-dimensional structures using this kind of reaction of DNA strands coming together. But a lot of their approaches, though elegant, take a long time. They can take a couple of years, or it can be difficult to design. So I came up with a new method a couple of years ago I call DNA origami that's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop. But to do it, you need a long, single strand of DNA, which is technically very difficult to get. So, you can go to a natural source. You can look in this computer-fabricated artifact, and he's got a double-stranded genome — that's no good. You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria. They're no good either. Double strand again, but inside them, they're infected with a virus that has a nice, long, single-stranded genome that we can fold like a piece of paper. And here's how we do it. This is part of that genome. We add a bunch of short, synthetic DNAs that I call staples. Each one has a left half that binds the long strand in one place, and a right half that binds it in a different place, and brings the long strand together like this. The net action of many of these on that long strand is to fold it into something like a rectangle. Now, we can't actually take a movie of this process, but Shawn Douglas at Harvard has made a nice visualization for us that begins with a long strand and has some short strands in it. And what happens is that we mix these strands together. We heat them up, we add a little bit of salt, we heat them up to almost boiling and cool them down, and as we cool them down, the short strands bind the long strands and start to form structure. And you can see a little bit of double helix forming there. When you look at DNA origami, you can see that what it really is, even though you think it's complicated, is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other, and they're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one. So there's a strand that goes like this, goes along one helix and binds — it jumps to another helix and comes back. That holds the long strand like this. Now, to show that we could make any shape or pattern that we wanted, I tried to make this shape. I wanted to fold DNA into something that goes up over the eye, down the nose, up the nose, around the forehead, back down and end in a little loop like this. And so, I thought, if this could work, anything could work. So I had the computer program design the short staples to do this. I ordered them; they came by FedEx. I mixed them up, heated them, cooled them down, and I got 50 billion little smiley faces floating around in a single drop of water. And each one of these is just one-thousandth the width of a human hair, OK? So, they're all floating around in solution, and to look at them, you have to get them on a surface where they stick. So, you pour them out onto a surface and they start to stick to that surface, and we take a picture using an atomic-force microscope. It's got a needle, like a record needle, that goes back and forth over the surface, bumps up and down, and feels the height of the first surface. It feels the DNA origami. There's the atomic-force microscope working and you can see that the landing's a little rough. When you zoom in, they've got, you know, weak jaws that flip over their heads and some of their noses get punched out, but it's pretty good. You can zoom in and even see the extra little loop, this little nano-goatee. Now, what's great about this is anybody can do this. And so, I got this in the mail about a year after I did this, unsolicited. Anyone know what this is? What is it? It's China, right? So, what happened is, a graduate student in China, Lulu Qian, did a great job. She wrote all her own software to design and built this DNA origami, a beautiful rendition of China, which even has Taiwan, and you can see it's sort of on the world's shortest leash, right? (Laughter) So, this works really well and you can make patterns as well as shapes, OK? And you can make a map of the Americas and spell DNA with DNA. And what's really neat about it — well, actually, this all looks like nano-artwork, but it turns out that nano-artwork is just what you need to make nano-circuits. So, you can put circuit components on the staples, like a light bulb and a light switch. Let the thing assemble, and you'll get some kind of a circuit. And then you can maybe wash the DNA away and have the circuit left over. So, this is what some colleagues of mine at Caltech did. They took a DNA origami, organized some carbon nano-tubes, made a little switch, you see here, wired it up, tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch. Now, this is just a single switch and you need half a billion for a computer, so we have a long way to go. But this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one-tenth the size of those in a normal computer. So it's very promising for making small computers. Now, I want to get back to that compiler. The DNA origami is a proof that that compiler actually works. So, you start with something in the computer. You get a high-level description of the computer program, a high-level description of the origami. You can compile it to molecules, send it to a synthesizer, and it actually works. And it turns out that a company has made a nice program that's much better than my code, which was kind of ugly, and will allow us to do this in a nice, visual, computer-aided design way. So, now you can say, all right, why isn't DNA origami the end of the story? You have your molecular compiler, you can do whatever you want. The fact is that it does not scale. So if you want to build a human from DNA origami, the problem is, you need a long strand that's 10 trillion trillion bases long. That's three light years' worth of DNA, so we're not going to do this. We're going to turn to another technology, called algorithmic self-assembly of tiles. It was started by Erik Winfree, and what it does, it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a DNA origami. You zoom in, there are just four DNA strands and they have little single-stranded bits on them that can bind to other tiles, if they match. And we like to draw these tiles as little squares. And if you look at their sticky ends, these little DNA bits, you can see that they actually form a checkerboard pattern. So, these tiles would make a complicated, self-assembling checkerboard. And the point of this, if you didn't catch that, is that tiles are a kind of molecular program and they can output patterns. And a really amazing part of this is that any computer program can be translated into one of these tile programs — specifically, counting. So, you can come up with a set of tiles that when they come together, form a little binary counter rather than a checkerboard. So you can read off binary numbers five, six and seven. And in order to get these kinds of computations started right, you need some kind of input, a kind of seed. You can use DNA origami for that. You can encode the number 32 in the right-hand side of a DNA origami, and when you add those tiles that count, they will start to count — they will read that 32 and they'll stop at 32. So, what we've done is we've figured out a way to have a molecular program know when to stop going. It knows when to stop growing because it can count. It knows how big it is. So, that answers that sort of first question I was talking about. It doesn't tell us how babies do it, however. So now, we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than DNA origami could otherwise. Here's the DNA origami, and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the DNA origami, and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles, and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square. The counter serves as a template to fill in a square in the middle of this thing. So, what we've done is we've succeeded in making something much bigger than a DNA origami by combining DNA origami with tiles. And the neat thing about it is, is that it's also reprogrammable. You can just change a couple of the DNA strands in this binary representation and you'll get 96 rather than 32. And if you do that, the origami's the same size, but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger. So, this sort of recapitulates what I was telling you about development. You have a very sensitive computer program where small changes — single, tiny, little mutations — can take something that made one size square and make something very much bigger. Now, this — using counting to compute and build these kinds of things by this kind of developmental process is something that also has bearing on Craig Venter's question. So, you can ask, how many DNA strands are required to build a square of a given size? If we wanted to make a square of size 10, 100 or 1,000, if we used DNA origami alone, we would require a number of DNA strands that's the square of the size of that square; so we'd need 100, 10,000 or a million DNA strands. That's really not affordable. But if we use a little computation — we use origami, plus some tiles that count — then we can get away with using 100, 200 or 300 DNA strands. And so we can exponentially reduce the number of DNA strands we use, if we use counting, if we use a little bit of computation. And so computation is some very powerful way to reduce the number of molecules you need to build something, to reduce the size of the genome that you're building. And finally, I'm going to get back to that sort of crazy idea about computers building computers. If you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it, the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory. So if you affix some wires and switches to those tiles — rather than to the staple strands, you affix them to the tiles — then they'll self-assemble the somewhat complicated circuits, the demultiplexer circuits, that you need to address this memory. So you can actually make a complicated circuit using a little bit of computation. It's a molecular computer building an electronic computer. Now, you ask me, how far have we gotten down this path? Experimentally, this is what we've done in the last year. Here is a DNA origami rectangle, and here are some tiles growing from it. And you can see how they count. One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, 10, 11, 12, 17. So it's got some errors, but at least it counts up. (Laughter) So, it turns out we actually had this idea nine years ago, and that's about the time constant for how long it takes to do these kinds of things, so I think we made a lot of progress. We've got ideas about how to fix these errors. And I think in the next five or 10 years, we'll make the kind of squares that I described and maybe even get to some of those self-assembled circuits. So now, what do I want you to take away from this talk? I want you to remember that to create life's very diverse and complex forms, life uses computation to do that. And the computations that it uses, they're molecular computations, and in order to understand this and get a better handle on it, as Feynman said, you know, we need to build something to understand it. And so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing, rebuild everything from the bottom up, using DNA in ways that nature never intended, using DNA origami, and DNA origami to seed this algorithmic self-assembly. You know, so this is all very cool, but what I'd like you to take from the talk, hopefully from some of those big questions, is that this molecular programming isn't just about making gadgets. It's not just making about — it's making self-assembled cell phones and circuits. What it's really about is taking computer science and looking at big questions in a new light, asking new versions of those big questions and trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things. Thank you. (Applause)

Our next giant leap

Peter Diamandis

{0: 'Peter Diamandis'}

{0: ['space activist']}

{0: 'Peter Diamandis runs the X Prize Foundation, which offers large cash incentive prizes to inventors who can solve grand challenges like space flight, low-cost mobile medical diagnostics and oil spill cleanup. He is the chair of Singularity University, which teaches executives and grad students about exponentially growing technologies.'}

2005-07-07

2008-09-03

TEDGlobal 2005

en

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

['business', 'design', 'exploration', 'science', 'space', 'technology']

{4: 'The real future of space exploration', 178: 'This is Saturn', 141: "Inside the world's deepest caves", 1835: 'Can technology solve our big problems?', 292: "Stephen Hawking's zero g flight", 1488: 'Tour the solar system from home'}

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

Peter Diamandis says it's our moral imperative to keep exploring space -- and he talks about how, with the X Prize and other incentives, we're going to do just that.

My mission in life since I was a kid was, and is, to take the rest of you into space. It's during our lifetime that we're going to take the Earth, take the people of Earth and transition off, permanently. And that's exciting. In fact, I think it is a moral imperative that we open the space frontier. You know, it's the first time that we're going to have a chance to have planetary redundancy, a chance to, if you would, back up the biosphere. And if you think about space, everything we hold of value on this planet — metals and minerals and real estate and energy — is in infinite quantities in space. In fact, the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. The analogy for me is Alaska. You know, we bought Alaska. We Americans bought Alaska in the 1850s. It's called Seward's folly. We valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill. And then we discovered these things — gold and oil and fishing and timber — and it became, you know, a trillion-dollar economy, and now we take our honeymoons there. The same thing will happen in space. We are on the verge of the greatest exploration that the human race has ever known. We explore for three reasons, the weakest of which is curiosity. You know, it's funded NASA's budget up until now. Some images from Mars, 1997. In fact, I think in the next decade, without any question, we will discover life on Mars and find that it is literally ubiquitous under the soils and different parts of that planet. The stronger motivator, the much stronger motivator, is fear. It drove us to the moon. We — literally in fear — with the Soviet Union raced to the moon. And we have these huge rocks, you know, killer-sized rocks in the hundreds of thousands or millions out there, and while the probability is very small, the impact, figured in literally, of one of these hitting the Earth is so huge that to spend a small fraction looking, searching, preparing to defend, is not unreasonable. And of course, the third motivator, one near and dear to my heart as an entrepreneur, is wealth. In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids, there's a class of the nickel iron, which in platinum-group metal markets alone are worth something like 20 trillion dollars, if you can go out and grab one of these rocks. My plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market, and then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one. And that will fund the actual mission to go and get one. But fear, curiosity and greed have driven us. And for me, this is — I'm the short kid on the right. This was — my motivation was actually during Apollo. And Apollo was one of the greatest motivators ever. If you think about what happened at the turn of — early 1960s, on May 25, JFK said, "We're going to go to the moon." And people left their jobs and they went to obscure locations to go and be part of this amazing mission. And we knew nothing about going to space. We went from having literally put Alan Shepard in suborbital flight to going to the moon in eight years, and the average age of the people that got us there was 26 years old. They didn't know what couldn't be done. They had to make up everything. And that, my friend, is amazing motivation. This is Gene Cernan, a good friend of mine, saying, "If I can go to the moon" — this is the last human on the moon so far — "nothing, nothing is impossible." But of course, we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there. But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there. The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier. The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch. That's a pathetic number. It's unreasonable. We shouldn't be happy in standing for that. One of the things that we did with the Ansari X PRIZE was take the challenge on that risk is OK, you know. As we are going out there and taking on a new frontier, we should be allowed to risk. In fact, anyone who says we shouldn't, you know, just needs to be put aside, because, as we go forward, in fact, the greatest discoveries we will ever know is ahead of us. The entrepreneurs in the space business are the furry mammals, and clearly the industrial-military complex — with Boeing and Lockheed and NASA — are the dinosaurs. The ability for us to access these resources to gain planetary redundancy — we can now gather all the information, the genetic codes, you know, everything stored on our databases, and back them up off the planet, in case there would be one of those disastrous situations. The difficulty is getting there, and clearly, the cost to orbit is key. Once you're in orbit, you are two thirds of the way, energetically, to anywhere — the moon, to Mars. And today, there's only three vehicles — the U.S. shuttle, the Russian Soyuz and the Chinese vehicle — that gets you there. Arguably, it's about 100 million dollars a person on the space shuttle. One of the companies I started, Space Adventures, will sell you a ticket. We've done two so far. We'll be announcing two more on the Soyuz to go up to the space station for 20 million dollars. But that's expensive and to understand what the potential is — (Laughter) — it is expensive. But people are willing to pay that! You know, one — we have a very unique period in time today. For the first time ever, we have enough wealth concentrated in the hands of few individuals and the technology accessible that will allow us to really drive space exploration. But how cheap could it get? I want to give you the end point. We know — 20 million dollars today, you can go and buy a ticket, but how cheap could it get? Let's go back to high school physics here. If you calculate the amount of potential energy, mgh, to take you and your spacesuit up to a couple hundred miles, and then you accelerate yourself to 17,500 miles per hour — remember, that one half MV squared — and you figure it out. It's about 5.7 gigajoules of energy. If you expended that over an hour, it's about 1.6 megawatts. If you go to one of Vijay's micro-power sources, and they sell it to you for seven cents a kilowatt hour — anybody here fast in math? How much will it cost you and your spacesuit to go to orbit? 100 bucks. That's the price-improvement curve that — we need some breakthroughs in physics along the way, I'll grant you that. (Laughter) But guys, if history has taught us anything, it's that if you can imagine it, you will get there eventually. I have no question that the physics, the engineering to get us down to the point where all of us can afford orbital space flight is around the corner. The difficulty is that there needs to be a real marketplace to drive the investment. Today, the Boeings and the Lockheeds don't spend a dollar of their own money in R&D. It's all government research dollars, and very few of those. And in fact, the large corporations, the governments, can't take the risk. So we need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space. Today's commercial markets worldwide, global commercial launch market? 12 to 15 launches per year. Number of commercial companies out there? 12 to 15 companies. One per company. That's not it. There's only one marketplace, and I call them self-loading carbon payloads. They come with their own money. They're easy to make. It's people. The Ansari X PRIZE was my solution, reading about Lindbergh for creating the vehicles to get us there. We offered 10 million dollars in cash for the first reusable ship, carry three people up to 100 kilometers, come back down, and within two weeks, make the trip again. Twenty-six teams from seven countries entered the competition, spending between one to 25 million dollars each. And of course, we had beautiful SpaceShipOne, which made those two flights and won the competition. And I'd like to take you there, to that morning, for just a quick video. (Video) Pilot: Release our fire. Richard Searfoss: Good luck. (Applause) RS: We've got an altitude call of 368,000 feet. (Applause) RS: So in my official capacity as the chief judge of the Ansari X PRIZE competition, I declare that Mojave Aerospace Ventures has indeed earned the Ansari X PRIZE. (Applause) Peter Diamandis: Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do was raise the capital for this. It was literally impossible. We went — I went to 100, 200 CEOs, CMOs. No one believed it was done. Everyone said, "Oh, what does NASA think? Well, people are going to die, how can you possibly going to put this forward?" I found a visionary family, the Ansari family, and Champ Car, and raised part of the money, but not the full 10 million. And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a hole-in-one insurance policy. See, the insurance companies went to Boeing and Lockheed, and said, "Are you going to compete?" No. "Are you going to compete?" No. "No one's going to win this thing." So, they took a bet that no one would win by January of '05, and I took a bet that someone would win. (Applause) So — and the best thing is they paid off and the check didn't bounce. (Laughter) We've had a lot of accomplishments and it's been a tremendous success. One of the things I'm most happy about is that the SpaceShipOne is going to hang in Air and Space Museum, next to the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer. Isn't that great? (Applause) So a little bit about the future, steps to space, what's available for you. Today, you can go and experience weightless flights. By '08, suborbital flights, the price tag for that, you know, on Virgin, is going to be about 200,000. There are three or four other serious efforts that will bring the price down very rapidly, I think, to about 25,000 dollars for a suborbital flight. Orbital flights — we can take you to the space station. And then I truly believe, once a group is in orbit around the Earth — I know if they don't do it, I am — we're going to stockpile some fuel, make a beeline for the moon and grab some real estate. (Laughter) Quick moment for the designers in the audience. We spent 11 years getting FAA approval to do zero gravity flights. Here are some fun images. Here's Burt Rutan and my good friend Greg Meronek inside a zero gravity — people think a zero gravity room, there's a switch on there that turns it off — but it's actually parabolic flight of an airplane. And turns out 7-Up has just done a little commercial that's airing this month. If we can get the audio up? (Video) Narrator: For a chance to win the first free ticket to space, look for specially marked packages of Diet 7-Up. When you want the taste that won't weigh you down, the only way to go is up. PD: That was filmed inside our airplane, and so, you can now do this. We're based down in Florida. Let me talk about the other thing I'm excited about. The future of prizes. You know, prizes are a very old idea. I had the pleasure of borrowing from the Longitude Prize and the Orteig Prize that put Lindbergh forward. And we have made a decision in the X PRIZE Foundation to actually carry that concept forward into other technology areas, and we just took on a new mission statement: "to bring about radical breakthroughs in space and other technologies for the benefit of humanity." And this is something that we're very excited about. I showed this slide to Larry Page, who just joined our board. And you know, when you give to a nonprofit, you might have 50 cents on the dollar. If you have a matching grant, it's typically two or three to one. If you put up a prize, you can get literally a 50 to one leverage on your dollars. And that's huge. And then he turned around and said, "Well, if you back a prize institute that runs a 10 prize, you get 500 to one." I said, "Well, that's great." So, we have actually — are looking to turn the X PRIZE into a world-class prize institute. This is what happens when you put up a prize, when you announce it and teams start to begin doing trials. You get publicity increase, and when it's won, publicity shoots through the roof — if it's properly managed — and that's part of the benefits to a sponsor. Then, when the prize is actually won, after it's moving, you get societal benefits, you know, new technology, new capability. And the benefit to the sponsors is the sum of the publicity and societal benefits over the long term. That's our value proposition in a prize. If you were going to go and try to create SpaceShipOne, or any kind of a new technology, you have to fund that from the beginning and maintain that funding with an uncertain outcome. It may or may not happen. But if you put up a prize, the beautiful thing is, you know, it's a very small maintenance fee, and you pay on success. Orteig didn't pay a dime out to the nine teams that went across — tried to go across the Atlantic, and we didn't pay a dime until someone won the Ansari X PRIZE. So, prizes work great. You know, innovators, the entrepreneurs out there, you know that when you're going for a goal, the first thing you have to do is believe that you can do it yourself. Then, you've got to, you know, face potential public ridicule of — that's a crazy idea, it'll never work. And then you have to convince others, so that they can, in fact, help you raise the funds, and then you've got to deal with the fact that you've got government bureaucracies and institutions that don't want you to move those things forward, and you have to deal with failures. What a prize does, what we've experienced a prize doing, is literally help to short-circuit or support all of these things, because a prize credentials the idea that this is a good idea. Well, it must be a good idea. Someone's offering 10 million dollars to go and do this thing. And each of these areas was something that we found the Ansari X PRIZE helped short-circuit these for innovation. So, as an organization, we put together a prize discovery process of how to come up with prizes and write the rules, and we're actually looking at creating prizes in a number of different categories. We're looking at attacking energy, environment, nanotechnology — and I'll talk about those more in a moment. And the way we're doing that is we're creating prize teams within the X PRIZE. We have a space prize team. We're going after an orbital prize. We are looking at a number of energy prizes. Craig Venter has just joined our board and we're doing a rapid genome sequencing prize with him, we'll be announcing later this fall, about — imagine being able to sequence anybody's DNA for under 1,000 dollars, revolutionize medicine. And clean water, education, medicine and even looking at social entrepreneurship. So my final slide here is, the most critical tool for solving humanity's grand challenges — it isn't technology, it isn't money, it's only one thing — it's the committed, passionate human mind. (Applause)

The web is more than "better TV"

Peter Hirshberg

{0: 'Peter Hirshberg'}

{0: ['entrepreneur', 'marketer']}

{0: 'A Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketing specialist, Peter Hirshberg might just be the definitive voice on how new technology affects business and culture.'}

2007-12-12

2008-09-04

EG 2007

en

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

['business', 'history', 'media', 'technology', 'telecom', 'television', 'Best of the Web']

{19: 'How technology evolves', 362: 'The Web as a city', 72: "Technology's long tail", 2043: 'A 30-year history of the future', 1152: 'Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data', 230: '5 predictions, from 1984'}

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

In this absorbing look at emerging media and tech history, Peter Hirshberg shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than "better TV."

Well, good morning. You know, the computer and television both recently turned 60, and today I'd like to talk about their relationship. Despite their middle age, if you've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry, it's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other. So it's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television, or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers' strike. And it's not just what these are doing to each other, but it's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter. To get a sense of this, and it's been a theme we've talked about all week, I recently talked to a bunch of tweeners. I wrote on cards: "television," "radio," "MySpace," "Internet," "PC." And I said, just arrange these, from what's important to you and what's not, and then tell me why. Let's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television. (Video) Girl 1: Well, I think it's important but, like, not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs. Peter Hirshberg: Which is more fun, Internet or TV? Girls: Internet. Girl 2: I think we — the reasons, one of the reasons we put computer before TV is because nowadays, like, we have TV shows on the computer. (Girl 3: Oh, yeah.) Girl 2: And then you can download onto your iPod. PH: Would you like to be the president of a TV network? Girl 4: I wouldn't like it. Girl 2: That would be so stressful. Girl 5: No. PH: How come? Girl 5: Because they're going to lose all their money eventually. Girl 3: Like the stock market, it goes up and down and stuff. I think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff. PH: There's been an uneasy relationship between the TV business and the tech business, really ever since they both turned about 30. We go through periods of enthrallment, followed by reactions in boardrooms, in the finance community best characterized as, what's the finance term? Ick pooey. Let me give you an example of this. The year is 1976, and Warner buys Atari because video games are on the rise. The next year they march forward and they introduce Qube, the first interactive cable TV system, and the New York Times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home, convergence, great things are happening. Everybody in the East Coast gets in the pictures — Citicorp, Penney, RCA — all getting into this big vision. By the way, this is about when I enter the picture. I'm going to do a summer internship at Time Warner. That summer I'm all — I'm at Warner that summer — I'm all excited to work on convergence, and then the bottom falls out. Doesn't work out too well for them, they lose money. And I had a happy brush with convergence until, kind of, Warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing. That's when I leave graduate school, and I can't work in New York on kind of entertainment and technology because I have to be exiled to California, where the remaining jobs are, almost to the sea, to go to work for Apple Computer. Warner, of course, writes off more than 400 million dollars. Four hundred million dollars, which was real money back in the '70s. But they were onto something and they got better at it. By the year 2000, the process was perfected. They merged with AOL, and in just four years, managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization, showing that they'd actually mastered the art of applying Moore's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet. (Laughter) Now, I think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities, or the media community, is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently. You know, for 50 years, we've talked about changing the world, about total transformation. For 50 years, it's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world. And I got to thinking, you know, who else talks that way? And the answer is pretty clearly — it's people in religion and in politics. And so I realized that actually the tech world is best understood, not as a business cycle, but as a messianic movement. We promise something great, we evangelize it, we're going to change the world. It doesn't work out too well, and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again, as the people in New York and L.A. look on in absolute, morbid astonishment. But it's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing. So, what I'd like to ask is, if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment, how did we get here? I mean, how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media? Of course, the first computer was built just after World War II to solve military problems, but things got really interesting just a couple of years later — 1949 with Whirlwind, built at MIT's Lincoln Lab. Jay Forrester was building this for the Navy, but you can't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star. So take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers, and the computer begins to express itself. (Video) Journalist: It's a Whirlwind electronic computer. With considerable trepidation, we undertake to interview this new machine. Jay Forrester: Hello New York, this is Cambridge. And this is the oscilloscope of the Whirlwind electronic computer. Would you like if I used the machine? Journalist: Yes, of course. But I have an idea, Mr. Forrester. Since this computer was made in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, why don't we switch down to the Pentagon in Washington and let the Navy's research chief, Admiral Bolster, give Whirlwind the workout? Calvin Bolster: Well, Ed, this problem concerns the Navy's Viking rocket. This rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky. Now, at the standard rate of fuel consumption, I would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine, at any instant, say at the end of 40 seconds, the amount of fuel remaining, and the velocity at that set instant. JF: Over on the left-hand side, you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off. And on the right-hand side, there's a scale that shows the rocket's velocity. The rocket's position is shown by the trajectory that we're now looking at. And as it reaches the peak of its trajectory, the velocity, you will notice, has dropped off to a minimum. Then, as the rocket dives down, velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground. How's that? Journalist: What about that, Admiral? CB: Looks very good to me. JF: And before leaving, we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time, in a less serious vein, for a Sunday afternoon. (Music) Journalist: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Forrester and the MIT lab. PH: You know, so much was worked out: the first real-time interaction, the video display, pointing a gun. It lead to the microcomputer, but unfortunately, it was too pricey for the Navy, and all of this would have been lost if it weren't for a happy coincidence. Enter the atomic bomb. We're threatened by the greatest weapon ever, and knowing a good thing when it sees it, the Air Force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us. They adapt Whirlwind to a massive air defense system, deploy it all across the frozen north, and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the Manhattan Project building the A-Bomb in the first place. Talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry. And you can imagine that the Air Force became a pretty good salesman. Here's their marketing video. (Video) Narrator: In a mass raid, high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks. And then it would be too late to act. We cannot afford to take that chance. It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system, to strengthen our air defenses. This new computer, built to become the nerve center of a defense network, is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid. It is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators, air-conditioning equipment, and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer. PH: You know, that one computer was huge. There's an interesting marketing lesson from it, which is basically, when you market a product, you can either say, this is going to be wonderful, it will make you feel better and enliven you. Or there's one other marketing proposition: if you don't use our product, you'll die. This is a really good example of that. This had the first pointing device. It was distributed, so it worked out — distributed computing and modems — so all these things could talk to each other. About 20 percent of all the nation's programmers were wrapped up in this thing, and it led to an awful lot of what we have today. It also used vacuum tubes. You saw how huge it was, and to give you a sense for this — because we've talked a lot about Moore's law and making things small at this conference, so let's talk about making things large. If we took Whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know, say, Century City, it would fit beautifully. You'd kind of have to take Century City out, but it could fit in there. But like, let's imagine we took the latest Pentium processor, the latest Core 2 Extreme, which is a four-core processor that Intel's working on, it will be our laptop tomorrow. To build that, what we'd do with Whirlwind technology is we'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to Mulholland, and from the 405 to La Cienega just with those Whirlwinds. And then, the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of Los Angeles. That's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of France creates. So, the next time they tell you they're on to something, clearly they're not. So — and we haven't even worked out the cooling needs. But it gives you the kind of power that people have, that the audience has, and the reasons these transformations are happening. All of this stuff starts moving into industry. DEC kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer. It shows up at places like MIT, and then a mutation happens. Spacewar! is built, the first computer game, and all of a sudden, interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out. Actually, many MIT students stayed up all night long working on this thing, and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out. DEC knew a good thing about wasting time. It shipped every one of its computers with that game. Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, by the mid-'50s, the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely. A new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they're quite certain that television is about to do them in. In fact, despair is in the air. And a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything I've been reading all week. RCA had David Sarnoff, who basically commercialized radio, said this, "I don't say that radio networks must die. Every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern, new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues. It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio, but I don't know how." And of course, as the computer industry develops interactively, producers in the emerging TV business actually hit on the same idea. And they fake it. (Video) Jack Berry: Boys and girls, I think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set, you just get them out. First of all, get your Winky Dink kits out. Put out your Magic Window and your erasing glove, and rub it like this. That's the way we get some of the magic into it, boys and girls. Then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set, and rub it out from the center to the corners, like this. Make sure you keep your magic crayons handy, your Winky Dink crayons and your erasing glove, because you'll be using them during the show to draw like that. You all set? OK, let's get right to the first story about Dusty Man. Come on into the secret lab. PH: It was the dawn of interactive TV, and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the Winky Dink kits. Those are the Winky Dink crayons. I know what you're saying. "Pete, I could use any ordinary open-source crayon, why do I have to buy theirs?" I assure you, that's not the case. Turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your Winky Dink Magic Window, other crayons may discolor or hurt the window. This proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere. It led to lawsuits — (Laughter) — federal investigations, and lots of repercussions, and that's a scandal we won't discuss today. But we will discuss this scandal, because this man, Jack Berry, the host of "Winky Dink," went on to become the host of "Twenty One," one of the most important quiz shows ever. And it was rigged, and it became unraveled when this man, Charles van Doren, was outed after an unnatural winning streak, ending Berry's career. And actually, ending the career of a lot of people at CBS. It turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked. And 50 years ago, if you'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media, there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from, Professor Marshall McLuhan. He actually understood something about a theme that we've been discussing all week. It's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications. Here he is talking from the 1960s. (Video) Marshall McLuhan: If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows. They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do. They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged. Now, then, this was a horrible misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers. PH: You know, McLuhan talked about the global village. If you substitute the word blogosphere, of the Internet today, it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now. Let's listen in to him. (Video) MM: The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business and much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers' column writ large. And it doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. And so the global village is as big as a planet, and as small as a village post office. PH: We'll talk a little bit more about him later. We're now right into the 1960s. It's the era of big business and data centers for computing. But all that was about to change. You know, the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in. And when I say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations, it's not just a joke about messianism, it's actually what we do. But for this part of the story, I'd actually like to throw it to America's leading technology correspondent, John Markoff. (Video) John Markoff: Do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing? Everything. It all happened within five miles of where I'm standing, at Stanford University, between 1960 and 1975. In the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks, a group of researchers led by people like John McCarthy, a computer scientist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Doug Engelbart, a computer scientist at SRI, changed the world. Engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture, but while he was beginning to do his work, all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula. There was LSD leaking out of Kesey's Veterans' Hospital experiments and other areas around the campus, and there was music literally in the streets. The Grateful Dead was playing in the pizza parlors. People were leaving to go back to the land. There was the Vietnam War. There was black liberation. There was women's liberation. This was a remarkable place, at a remarkable time. And into that ferment came the microprocessor. I think it was that interaction that led to personal computing. They saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build. And most importantly, they had this ethos of sharing information. I think these ideas are difficult to understand, because when you're trapped in one paradigm, the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe — it makes no sense. The stories were so compelling that I decided to write a book about them. The title of the book is, "What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." The title was taken from the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song. The lyrics go, "Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head." (Music) PH: By this time, computing had kind of leapt into media territory, and in short order much of what we're doing today was imagined in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. Here's the Architecture Machine Group, the predecessor of the Media Lab, in 1981. Meanwhile, in California, we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff. HyperCard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks, where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture, or piece of text, or data across a file system, and we had no way of explaining it. There was no metaphor. Was it a database? A prototyping tool? A scripted language? Heck, it was everything. So we ended up writing a marketing brochure. We asked a question about how the mind works, and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant. A few years later, we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of, how do you get the content you want, the way you want it and the easy way? Here's the Apple marketing video. (Video) James Burke: You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there are several ways to create a HyperCard interactive video. The most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own HyperCard stacks. By far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and HyperCard stacks from a commercial supplier. The method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom HyperCard stacks. This method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests. PH: I hope you realize how subversive that is. That's like a Dick Cheney speech. You think he's a nice balding guy, but he's just declared war on the content business. Find the commercial stuff, mash it up, tell the story your way. Now, as long as we confine this to the education market, and a personal matter between the computer and the file system, that's fine, but as you can see, it was about to leap out and upset Jack Valenti and a lot of other people. By the way, speaking of the filing system, it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network. A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee worked that out. It became a killer app of links, and today, of course, we call that the World Wide Web. Now, not only was I instrumental in helping Apple miss the Internet, but a couple of years later, I helped Bill Gates do the same thing. The year is 1993 and he was working on a book and I was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this. We were plenty aware that we were messing with media, and on the surface, it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things, but we also missed an awful lot. Let's take a look. (Video) Narrator: The pyramids, the Colosseum, the New York subway system and TV dinners, ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all. Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology, the Digital Superhighway. Once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians. The Digital Highway arrived in America's living rooms late in the twentieth century. Let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible. The Digital Highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by Alexander Graham Bell. Though some were incredulous ... Man 1: The phone company! Narrator: Stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising, David Sarnoff commercializes radio. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: The medium introduced America to new products. Voice 1: Say, mom, Windows for Radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family. Be sure to enjoy Windows for Radio at home and at work. Narrator: In 1939, the Radio Corporation of America introduced television. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: Eventually, the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company. And further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry, and the re-regulation of the cable television industry. Ted Turner: We did the work to build this, this cable industry, now the broadcasters want some of our money. I mean, it's ridiculous. Narrator: Computers, once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks, escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas. The world and all its culture reduced to bits, the lingua franca of all media. And the forces of convergence exploded. Finally, four great industrial sectors combined. Telecommunications, entertainment, computing and everything else. Man 3: We'll see channels for the gourmet and we'll see channels for the pet lover. Voice 2: Next on the gourmet pet channel, decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer. Narrator: All of industry was in play, as investors flocked to place their bets. At stake: the battle for you, the consumer, and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of America. (Music) PH: We missed a lot. You know, you missed, we missed the Internet, the long tail, the role of the audience, open systems, social networks. It just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media. Thomas Edison had the same problem. He wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it, and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea. Well, you know where we're going on from here. We come into the era of the dotcom, the World Wide Web, and I don't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together. But when we emerge from this and what we call Web 2.0, things actually are quite different. And I think it's the reason that TV's so challenged. If Internet one was about pages, now it's about people. It's a customer, it's an audience, it's a person who's participating. It's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now. (Video) MM: Because it gave the audience a role, something to do. PH: In my own company, Technorati, we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in. That's about 2,700 fresh, connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there. And it's no wonder that as we head into the writers' strike, odd things happen. You know, it reminds me of that old saw in Hollywood, that a producer is anyone who knows a writer. I now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem. But it's not a joke. This is a real headline. "Websites attract striking writers: operators of sites like MyDamnChannel.com could benefit from labor disputes." Meanwhile, you have the TV bloggers going out on strike, in sympathy with the television writers. And then you have TV Guide, a Fox property, which is about to sponsor the online video awards — but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television, not appearing to gloat. To show you how schizophrenic this all is, here's the head of MySpace, or Fox Interactive, a News Corp company, being asked, well, with the writers' strike, isn't this going to hurt News Corp and help you online? (Video) Man: But I, yeah, I think there's an opportunity. As the strike continues, there's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like MySpace TV. PH: Oh, but then he remembers he works for Rupert Murdoch. (Video) Man: Yes, well, first, you know, I'm part of News Corporation as part of Fox Entertainment Group. Obviously, we hope that the strike is — that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible. PH: One of the great things that's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening. Here is a clip from a video, from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in Hollywood, animation worked out in Israel, farmed out to Croatia and India, and it's now an international series. (Video) Narrator: The following takes place between the minutes of 2:15 p.m. and 2:18 p.m., in the months preceding the presidential primaries. Voice 1: You'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over. Voice 2: You mean we'll have to live here, together? Voices 2, 3 and 4: With her? Voice 2: Well, there goes the neighborhood. PH: The company that created this, Aniboom, is an interesting example of where this is headed. Traditional TV animation costs, say, between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute. They're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute. And they're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end, in a much more entrepreneurial manner. So, it's a different model. What the entertainment business is struggling with, the world of brands is figuring out. For example, Nike now understands that Nike Plus is not just a device in its shoe, it's a network to hook its customers together. And the head of marketing at Nike says, "People are coming to our site an average of three times a week. We don't have to go to them." Which means television advertising is down 57 percent for Nike. Or, as Nike's head of marketing says, "We're not in the business of keeping media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with consumers." And media companies realize the audience is important also. Here's a man announcing the new Market Watch from Dow Jones, powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page — user-generated content married up with traditional content. It turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them. Or, as Geoffrey Moore once told me, it's intellectual curiosity that's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere. And I think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business. One of my heroes is songwriter, Ally Willis, who just wrote "The Color Purple" and has been an R and — rhythm and blues writer, and this is what she said about where songwriting's going. Ally Willis: Where millions of collaborators wanted the song, because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about. PH: So, to wrap up, I'd love to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan, who, 40 years ago, was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change, and I think that, today, traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before. But I don't need to tell you this, let's throw it back to him. (Video) Narrator: We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new. MM: The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this. They don't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up. They think of the old medium, because the old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies. And so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable, but the real, real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored. PH: I think it's a great time of enthrallment. There's been more raw DNA of communications and media thrown out there. Content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth, and part of social communications, and I think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity. And whereas television may have gotten beat up, what's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication, and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it. Thanks very much.

What we think we know

Jonathan Drori

{0: 'Jonathan Drori'}

{0: ['educator']}

{0: "Jonathan Drori commissioned the BBC's very first websites, one highlight in a long career devoted to online culture and educational media -- and understanding how we learn."}

2007-02-02

2008-09-05

TED2007

en

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

['education', 'illusion', 'media', 'science', 'technology']

{22: 'Why people believe weird things', 78: 'Visual illusions that show how we (mis)think', 143: 'Flip your thinking on AIDS in Africa', 1827: 'The pursuit of ignorance', 1580: 'Smart failure for a fast-changing world', 2032: 'Why we should trust scientists'}

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

Starting with four basic questions (that you may be surprised to find you can't answer), Jonathan Drori looks at the gaps in our knowledge -- and specifically, what we don't about science that we might think we do.

I'm going to try and explain why it is that perhaps we don't understand as much as we think we do. I'd like to begin with four questions. This is not some sort of cultural thing for the time of year. That's an in-joke, by the way. But these four questions, actually, are ones that people who even know quite a lot about science find quite hard. And they're questions that I've asked of science television producers, of audiences of science educators — so that's science teachers — and also of seven-year-olds, and I find that the seven-year-olds do marginally better than the other audiences, which is somewhat surprising. So the first question, and you might want to write this down, either on a bit of paper, physically, or a virtual piece of paper in your head. And, for viewers at home, you can try this as well. A little seed weighs next to nothing and a tree weighs a lot, right? I think we agree on that. Where does the tree get the stuff that makes up this chair, right? Where does all this stuff come from? (Knocks) And your next question is, can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery, a bulb and one piece of wire? And would you be able to, kind of, draw a — you don't have to draw the diagram, but would you be able to draw the diagram, if you had to do it? Or would you just say, that's actually not possible? The third question is, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? I think we can probably agree that it is hotter in summer than in winter, but why? And finally, would you be able to — and you can sort of scribble it, if you like — scribble a plan diagram of the solar system, showing the shape of the planets' orbits? Would you be able to do that? And if you can, just scribble a pattern. OK. Now, children get their ideas not from teachers, as teachers often think, but actually from common sense, from experience of the world around them, from all the things that go on between them and their peers, and their carers, and their parents, and all of that. Experience. And one of the great experts in this field, of course, was, bless him, Cardinal Wolsey. Be very careful what you get into people's heads because it's virtually impossible to shift it afterwards, right? (Laughter) I'm not quite sure how he died, actually. Was he beheaded in the end, or hung? (Laughter) Now, those questions, which, of course, you've got right, and you haven't been conferring, and so on. And I — you know, normally, I would pick people out and humiliate, but maybe not in this instance. A little seed weighs a lot and, basically, all this stuff, 99 percent of this stuff, came out of the air. Now, I guarantee that about 85 percent of you, or maybe it's fewer at TED, will have said it comes out of the ground. And some people, probably two of you, will come up and argue with me afterwards, and say that actually, it comes out of the ground. Now, if that was true, we'd have trucks going round the country, filling people's gardens in with soil, it'd be a fantastic business. But, actually, we don't do that. The mass of this comes out of the air. Now, I passed all my biology exams in Britain. I passed them really well, but I still came out of school thinking that that stuff came out of the ground. Second one: can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery bulb and one piece of wire? Yes, you can, and I'll show you in a second how to do that. Now, I have some rather bad news, which is that I had a piece of video that I was about to show you, which unfortunately — the sound doesn't work in this room, so I'm going to describe to you, in true "Monty Python" fashion, what happens in the video. And in the video, a group of researchers go to MIT on graduation day. We chose MIT because, obviously, that's a very long way away from here, and you wouldn't mind too much, but it sort of works the same way in Britain and in the West Coast of the USA. And we asked them these questions, and we asked those questions of science graduates, and they couldn't answer them. And so, there's a whole lot of people saying, "I'd be very surprised if you told me that this came out of the air. That's very surprising to me." And those are science graduates. And we intercut it with, "We are the premier science university in the world," because of British-like hubris. (Laughter) And when we gave graduate engineers that question, they said it couldn't be done. And when we gave them a battery, and a piece of wire, and a bulb, and said, "Can you do it?" They couldn't do it. Right? And that's no different from Imperial College in London, by the way, it's not some sort of anti-American thing going on. As if. Now, the reason this matters is we pay lots and lots of money for teaching people — we might as well get it right. And there are also some societal reasons why we might want people to understand what it is that's happening in photosynthesis. For example, one half of the carbon equation is how much we emit, and the other half of the carbon equation, as I'm very conscious as a trustee of Kew, is how much things soak up, and they soak up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That's what plants actually do for a living. And, for any Finnish people in the audience, this is a Finnish pun: we are, both literally and metaphorically, skating on thin ice if we don't understand that kind of thing. Now, here's how you do the battery and the bulb. It's so easy, isn't it? Of course, you all knew that. But if you haven't played with a battery and a bulb, if you've only seen a circuit diagram, you might not be able to do that, and that's one of the problems. So, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? We learn, as children, that you get closer to something that's hot, and it burns you. It's a very powerful bit of learning, and it happens pretty early on. By extension, we think to ourselves, "Why it's hotter in summer than in winter must be because we're closer to the Sun." I promise you that most of you will have got that. Oh, you're all shaking your heads, but only a few of you are shaking your heads very firmly. Other ones are kind of going like this. All right. It's hotter in summer than in winter because the rays from the Sun are spread out more, right, because of the tilt of the Earth. And if you think the tilt is tilting us closer, no, it isn't. The Sun is 93 million miles away, and we're tilting like this, right? It makes no odds. In fact, in the Northern Hemisphere, we're further from the Sun in summer, as it happens, but it makes no odds, the difference. OK, now, the scribble of the diagram of the solar system. If you believe, as most of you probably do, that it's hotter in summer than in winter because we're closer to the Sun, you must have drawn an ellipse. Right? That would explain it, right? Except, in your — you're nodding — now, in your ellipse, have you thought, "Well, what happens during the night?" Between Australia and here, right, they've got summer and we've got winter, and what — does the Earth kind of rush towards the Sun at night, and then rush back again? I mean, it's a very strange thing going on, and we hold these two models in our head, of what's right and what isn't right, and we do that, as human beings, in all sorts of fields. So, here's Copernicus' view of what the solar system looked like as a plan. That's pretty much what you should have on your piece of paper. Right? And this is NASA's view. They're stunningly similar. I hope you notice the coincidence here. What would you do if you knew that people had this misconception, right, in their heads, of elliptical orbits caused by our experiences as children? What sort of diagram would you show them of the solar system, to show that it's not really like that? You'd show them something like this, wouldn't you? It's a plan, looking down from above. But, no, look what I found in the textbooks. That's what you show people, right? These are from textbooks, from websites, educational websites — and almost anything you pick up is like that. And the reason it's like that is because it's dead boring to have a load of concentric circles, whereas that's much more exciting, to look at something at that angle, isn't it? Right? And by doing it at that angle, if you've got that misconception in your head, then that two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional thing will be ellipses. So you've — it's crap, isn't it really? As we say. So, these mental models — we look for evidence that reinforces our models. We do this, of course, with matters of race, and politics, and everything else, and we do it in science as well. So we look, just look — and scientists do it, constantly — we look for evidence that reinforces our models, and some folks are just all too able and willing to provide the evidence that reinforces the models. So, being I'm in the United States, I'll have a dig at the Europeans. These are examples of what I would say is bad practice in science teaching centers. These pictures are from La Villette in France and the welcome wing of the Science Museum in London. And, if you look at the, kind of the way these things are constructed, there's a lot of mediation by glass, and it's very blue, and kind of professional — in that way that, you know, Woody Allen comes up from under the sheets in that scene in "Annie Hall," and said, "God, that's so professional." And that you don't — there's no passion in it, and it's not hands on, right, and, you know, pun intended. Whereas good interpretation — I'll use an example from nearby — is San Francisco Exploratorium, where all the things that — the demonstrations, and so on, are made out of everyday objects that children can understand, it's very hands-on, and they can engage with, and experiment with. And I know that if the graduates at MIT and in the Imperial College in London had had the battery and the wire and the bit of stuff, and you know, been able to do it, they would have learned how it actually works, rather than thinking that they follow circuit diagrams and can't do it. So good interpretation is more about things that are bodged and stuffed and of my world, right? And things that — where there isn't an extra barrier of a piece of glass or machined titanium, and it all looks fantastic, OK? And the Exploratorium does that really, really well. And it's amateur, but amateur in the best sense, in other words, the root of the word being of love and passion. So, children are not empty vessels, OK? So, as "Monty Python" would have it, this is a bit Lord Privy Seal to say so, but this is — children are not empty vessels. They come with their own ideas and their own theories, and unless you work with those, then you won't be able to shift them, right? And I probably haven't shifted your ideas of how the world and universe operates, either. But this applies, equally, to matters of trying to sell new technology. For example, we are, in Britain, we're trying to do a digital switchover of the whole population into digital technology [for television]. And it's one of the difficult things is that when people have preconceptions of how it all works, it's quite difficult to shift those. So we're not empty vessels; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood. Poor teaching actually does more harm than good. In this country and in Britain, magnetism is understood better by children before they've been to school than afterwards, OK? Same for gravity, two concepts, so it's — which is quite humbling, as a, you know, if you're a teacher, and you look before and after, that's quite worrying. They do worse in tests afterwards, after the teaching. And we collude. We design tests, or at least in Britain, so that people pass them. Right? And governments do very well. They pat themselves on the back. OK? We collude, and actually if you — if someone had designed a test for me when I was doing my biology exams, to really understand, to see whether I'd understood more than just kind of putting starch and iodine together and seeing it go blue, and really understood that plants took their mass out of the air, then I might have done better at science. So the most important thing is to get people to articulate their models. Your homework is — you know, how does an aircraft's wing create lift? An obvious question, and you'll have an answer now in your heads. And the second question to that then is, ensure you've explained how it is that planes can fly upside down. Ah ha, right. Second question is, why is the sea blue? All right? And you've all got an idea in your head of the answer. So, why is it blue on cloudy days? Ah, see. (Laughter) I've always wanted to say that in this country. (Laughter) Finally, my plea to you is to allow yourselves, and your children, and anyone you know, to kind of fiddle with stuff, because it's by fiddling with things that you, you know, you complement your other learning. It's not a replacement, it's just part of learning that's important. Thank you very much. Now — oh, oh yeah, go on then, go on. (Applause)

How humans and animals can live together

Jane Goodall

{0: 'Jane Goodall'}

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

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

2007-06-06

2008-09-08

TEDGlobal 2007

en

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

['Africa', 'animals', 'biodiversity', 'environment', 'global issues', 'pollution', 'primates', 'science']

{76: 'The gentle genius of bonobos', 145: 'The emergent genius of ant colonies', 126: 'Swim with the giant sunfish', 11: 'What separates us from chimpanzees?', 168: "The search for humanity's roots", 315: "A dig for humanity's origins"}

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

The legendary chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall talks about TACARE and her other community projects, which help people in booming African towns live side-by-side with threatened animals.

Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. We can go, jambo, guten Abend, bonsoir, but we can also ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening. You hear it going from one side of the valley to the other, from one group of nests to the next. And I want to pick up with my talk this evening from where Zeray left off yesterday. He was talking about this amazing, three-year-old Australopithecine child, Selam. And we've also been hearing about the history, the family tree, of mankind through DNA genetic profiling. And it was a paleontologist, the late Louis Leakey, who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees. And it was pretty extraordinary, way back then. It's kind of commonplace now, but his argument was — because he'd been searching for the fossilized remains of early humans in Africa. And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them. But what about how they behaved? That's what he wanted to know. And of course, behavior doesn't fossilize. He argued — and it's now a fairly common theory — that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same in our closest living relatives, the great apes, and humans today, then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like, human-like ancestor some seven million years ago. And therefore, perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us from that ancient, ancient past. Well, if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution, you very often find people speculating about how early humans may have behaved, based on the behavior of chimpanzees. They are more like us than any other living creature, and we've heard about that during this TED Conference. So it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us, in certain aspects of their behavior. Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality. Of course, I gave them names. They can live to be 60 years or more, although we think most of them probably don't make it to 60 in the wild. Mr. Wurzel. The female has her first baby when she's 11 or 12. Thereafter, she has one baby only every five or six years, a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing, sleeping with the mother at night, and riding on her back. And we believe that this long period of childhood is important for chimpanzees, just as it is for us, in relation to learning. As the brain becomes ever more complex during evolution in different forms of animals, so we find that learning plays an ever more important role in an individual's life history. And young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do. We know now that they're capable of imitating behaviors that they see. And we believe that it's in this way that the different tool-using behaviors — that have now been seen in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in Africa — how these are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice, so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture. Chimpanzees don't have a spoken language. We've talked about that. They do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures, many of which are similar, or even identical, to ours and formed in the same context. Greeting chimpanzees embracing. They also kiss, hold hands, pat one another on the back. And they swagger and they throw rocks. In chimpanzee society, we find many, many examples of compassion, precursors to love and true altruism. Unfortunately, they, like us, have a dark side to their nature. They're capable of extreme brutality, even a kind of primitive war. And these really aggressive behaviors, for the most part, are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group. They are very territorially aggressive. Chimpanzees, I believe, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that, after all, there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time as we make even more observations. The study that I began in 1960 is still continuing to this day. And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild, have helped — more than anything else — to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from, the amazing animals with whom we share the planet. So it's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees, like so many other creatures around the world, are losing their habitats. This is just one photograph from the air, and it shows you the forested highlands of Gombe. And it was when I flew over the whole area, about 16 years ago, and realized that outside the park, this forest, which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, which is where the tiny, 30-square-mile Gombe National Park lies, that a question came to my mind. "How can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees, when the people living around the National Park are struggling to survive?" More people are living there than the land could possibly support. The numbers increased by refugees pouring in from Burundi and over the lake from Congo. And very poor people — they couldn't afford to buy food from elsewhere. This led to a program, which we call TACARE. It's a very holistic way of improving the lives of the people living in the villages around the park. It started small with 12 villages. It's now in 24. There isn't time to go into it, but it's including things like tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded, almost desert-like land up in these mountains. Ways of controlling, preventing soil erosion. Ways of reclaiming overused farmland, so that within two years they can again be productive. Working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells. Perhaps build some schoolrooms. Most important of all, I believe, is working with small groups of women, providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans. And we've got, as is the case around the world, about 95 percent of all loans returned. Empowering women, working with education, providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school, in the clear understanding that, all around the world, as women's education improves, family size drops. We provide information about family planning and about HIV/AIDS. And as a result of this program, something's happening for conservation. What's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages, instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys — and by the way, many of the staff are now Tanzanian — but when we began the TACARE program, it was a Tanzanian team going into the villages. It was a Tanzanian team talking to the villagers, asking what they were interested in. Were they interested in conservation? Absolutely not. They were interested in health; they were interested in education. And as time went on, and as their situation began to improve, they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation. They began to understand that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees, so you've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides. Today, we are developing what we call the Greater Gombe Ecosystem. This is an area way outside the National Park, stretching out into all these very degraded lands. And as these villages have a better standard of life, they are actually agreeing to put between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside, so that once again, as the trees grow back, the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors through which they can travel to interact — as they must for genetic viability — with other remnant groups outside the National Park. So TACARE is a success. We're replicating it in other parts of Africa, around other wilderness areas which are faced with extreme population pressure. The problems in Africa, however, as we've been discussing for the whole of these first couple of days of TED, are major problems. There is a great deal of poverty. And when you get large numbers of people living in land that is not that fertile, particularly when you cut down trees, and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion, as desperate populations cut down more and more trees, so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families, what's going to happen? Something's got to give. And the other problems — in not only Africa, but the rest of the developing world and, indeed, everywhere — what are we doing to our planet? You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average European or American, we need three new planets. Today, they are saying four. But we don't have them. We've got one. And what's happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences, and yet we're destroying the only home we have. The indigenous people around the world, before they made a major decision, used to sit around and ask themselves, "How does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?" Today, major decisions — and I'm not particularly talking about Africa here, but the developed world — major decisions involving millions of dollars, and millions of people, are often based on, "How will this affect the next shareholders' meeting?" And these decisions affect Africa. As I began traveling around Africa talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests, I realized more and more how so many of Africa's problems could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation. So I began traveling outside Africa, talking in Europe, talking in the United States, going to Asia. And everywhere there were these terrible problems. And you know the kind I'm talking about. I'm talking about pollution. The air that we breathe that often poisons us. The earth is poisoning our foods. The water — water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues that we're going to face in this century — and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural, industrial and household chemicals that still are being sprayed around the world, seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience. The mangroves are being cut down; the effects of things like the tsunami get worse. We've talked about the soil erosion. We have the reckless burning of fossil fuels along with other greenhouse gasses, so called, leading to climate change. Finally, all around the world, people have begun to believe that there is something going on very wrong with our climate. All around the world climates are mixed up. And it's the poor people who are affected worse. It's Africa that already is affected. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the droughts are so much worse. And when the rain does come, it so often leads to flooding and added distress, and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease. And the numbers of people living in an area that the land cannot support, who are too poor to buy food, who can't move away because the whole land is degraded. And so you get desertification — creeping, creeping, creeping — as the last of the trees are cut down. And this kind of thing is not just in Africa. It's all over the world. So it wasn't surprising to me that as I was traveling around the world I met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope. We seem to have lost wisdom, the wisdom of the indigenous people. I asked a question. "Why?" Well, do you think there could be some kind of disconnect between this extraordinarily clever brain, the kind of brain that the TED technologies exemplify, and the human heart? Talking about it in the non-scientific term, in terms of love and compassion. Is there some disconnect? And these young people, when I talk to them, basically they were either depressed or apathetic, or bitter and angry. And they said more or less the same thing, "We feel this way because we feel you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it." We have compromised their future. I've got three little grandchildren, and every time I look at them and I think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was their age, I feel this desperation. And that led to this program we call Roots and Shoots, which began right here in Tanzania and has now spread to 97 countries around the world. It's symbolic. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall. See the brick wall as all these problems we've inflicted on the planet, environmental and social. It's a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world for all living things. The most important message of Roots and Shoots: every single one of us makes a difference, every single day. We have a choice. Every one of us in this room, we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make. The very poor have no choice. It's up to us to change things so that the poor have choice as well. The Roots and Shoots groups all choose three projects. It depends on how old they are, and which country, whether they're in a city or rural, as to what kinds of projects. But basically, we have programs now from preschool right through university, with more and more adults starting their own Roots and Shoots groups. And every group chooses, between them, three different kinds of project to make this a better world, recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected and impinge on each other. So one of their projects will be to help their own human community. And then, if they're able, they may raise money to help communities in other parts of the world. One of their projects will be to help animals — not just wildlife, domestic animals as well. And one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share. And woven throughout all of this is a message of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves, in our families, in our communities, between nations, between cultures, between religions and between us and the natural world. We need the natural world. We cannot go on destroying it at the rate we are. We not do have more than this one planet. Just picking one or two of the projects right here in Africa that the Roots and Shoots groups are doing, one or two projects only — in Tanzania, in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and other groups. And as I say, it's in 97 countries around the world. Of course, they're planting trees. They're growing organic vegetables. They're working in the refugee camps, with chickens and selling the eggs for a little amount of money, or just using them to feed their families, and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment, because they're no longer helpless and depending on others with their vegetables and their chickens. It's being used in Uganda to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers. Doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves. Once again, they're useful members of society. We have this program in prisons as well. So, there's no time for more Roots and Shoots now. But — oh, they're also working on HIV/AIDS. That's a very important component of Roots and Shoots, with older kids talking to younger ones. And unwanted pregnancies and things like that, which young people listen to better from other youth, rather than adults. Hope. That's the question I get asked as I'm going around the world: "Jane, you've seen so many terrible things, you've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number from about one million, at the turn of the century, to no more than 150,000 now, and the same with so many other animals. Forests disappearing, deserts where once there was forest. Do you really have hope?" Well, yes. You can't come to a conference like TED and not have hope, can you? And of course, there's hope. One is this amazing human brain. And I mean, think of the technologies. And I've just been so thrilled, finally, to come to people talking about compost latrines. It's one of my hobbyhorses. We just flush all this water down the lavatory, it's terrible. And then talking about renewable energy — desperately important. Do we care about the planet for our children? How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews? Do we care about their future? And if we care about their future, we, as the elite around the world, we can do something about it. We can make choices as to how we live each day. What we buy. What we wear. And choose to make these choices with the question, how will this affect the environment around me? How will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up? Or my grandchild, or whatever it is. So the human brain, coupled with the human heart, and we join hands around the world. And that's what TED is helping so well with, and Google who help us, and Esri are helping us with mapping in Gombe National Park. All of these technologies we can use. Now let's link them, and it's beginning to happen, isn't it? You've heard about it this afternoon. It's beginning to happen. This change, this change. To see change that we must have if we care about the future. And the next reason for hope — nature is amazingly resilient. You can take an area that's absolutely destroyed, with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate. And an example is the TACARE program. I told you, where a seemingly dead tree stump — if you stop hacking them for firewood, which you don't need to because you have wood lots, then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree. And animals, almost on the brink of extinction, can be given a second chance. That's my next book. It's inspiring. And it brings me to my last category of hope, and we've heard about this so much in the last two days: this indomitable human spirit. This determination of people, the resilience of the human spirit, So that people who you would think would be battered by poverty, or disease, or whatever, can pull themselves up out of it, sometimes with a helping hand, and take their part in society, and take their part in changing the world. And just to think of one or two people out of Africa who are just really inspiring. We could make a very long list, but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment, with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath. Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria, who took on the giant oil companies, and although people around the world tried their best, was executed. People like this are so inspirational. People like this are the role models we need for young Africans. And we need some environmental role models as well, and I've been hearing some of them today. So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message again, with everyone at TED. And I hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things, especially the Roots and Shoots program. And just a last word on that — the young woman who's running this entire conference center, I met her today. She came up so excited, with her certificate. She was [in] Roots and Shoots. She was in the leadership in Dar es Salaam. She said it's helped her to do what she's doing. And it was very, very exciting for me to meet her and see just one example of how young people, when they are empowered, given the opportunity to take action, to make the world a better place, truly are our hope for tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)

How to survive a nuclear attack

Irwin Redlener

{0: 'Irwin Redlener'}

{0: ['physician', 'disaster-preparedness activist']}

{0: "Dr. Irwin Redlener spends his days imagining the worst: He studies how humanity might survive natural or human-made disasters of unthinkable severity. He's been an outspoken critic of half-formed government recovery plans (especially after Katrina)."}

2008-02-29

2008-09-09

TED2008

en

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

['global issues', 'history', 'medicine', 'technology', 'war']

{167: '10 ways the world could end', 33: "Let's rethink America's military strategy", 54: 'My wish: A call for open-source architecture', 2650: "The world doesn't need more nuclear weapons", 52463: '3 questions we should ask about nuclear weapons', 881: 'Debate: Does the world need nuclear energy?'}

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

The face of nuclear terror has changed since the Cold War, but disaster-medicine expert Irwin Redlener reminds us the threat is still real. He looks at some of history's farcical countermeasures and offers practical advice on how to survive an attack.

So, a big question that we're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now: are we at risk of a nuclear attack? Now, there's a bigger question that's probably actually more important than that, is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack, eliminating the threat altogether. And I would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry, until this very moment, we've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that's characterized by two phases, which I'm going to go through with you right now. First of all, we started off the nuclear age in 1945. The United States had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project, and the idea was very straightforward: we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending World War II that we'd been involved in in Europe and in the Pacific. And in 1945, we were the only nuclear power. We had a few nuclear weapons, two of which we dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, a few days later in Nagasaki, in August 1945, killing about 250,000 people between those two. And for a few years, we were the only nuclear power on Earth. But by 1949, the Soviet Union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power, and they began to match what the United States had developed. And from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s. So by 1985 — each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads — the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads, and seven members of something that came to be known as the "nuclear club." And it was an extraordinary time, and I am going to go through some of the mentality that we — that Americans and the rest of the world were experiencing. But I want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 — going forward, of course — were part of the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view. We began to counter-proliferate, and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000. It's a very difficult number to deal with, because what we've done is we've quote unquote "decommissioned" some of the warheads. They're still probably usable. They could be "re-commissioned," but the way they count things, which is very complicated, we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before. But we also, in that period of time, added two more members to the nuclear club: Pakistan and North Korea. So we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world, but a very different set of circumstances. So I'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters. Chapter one is 1949 to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, and what we were dealing with, at that point and through those years, was a superpowers' nuclear arms race. It was characterized by a nation-versus-nation, very fragile standoff. And basically, we lived for all those years, and some might argue that we still do, in a situation of being on the brink, literally, of an apocalyptic, planetary calamity. It's incredible that we actually lived through all that. We were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym, which is MAD. It stands for mutually assured destruction. So it meant if you attacked us, we would attack you virtually simultaneously, and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine. So the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you. That's the way we lived. And the danger of that, of course, is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch, even though the first country had not actually launched anything. During this chapter one, there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe, and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that, in fact, a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could, in some ways, mean the end of civilization as we know it. So this was chapter one. Now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration, we engaged in America in a series — and in fact, in the Soviet Union — in a series of response planning. It was absolutely incredible. So premise one is we'd be destroying the world, and then premise two is, why don't we get prepared for it? So what we offered ourselves was a collection of things. I'm just going to go skim through a few things, just to jog your memories. If you're born after 1950, this is just — consider this entertainment, otherwise it's memory lane. This was Bert the Turtle. (Video) This was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war, then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover. That was the principle. You — there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us, and if you get under your desk, things would be OK. (Laughter) I didn't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school, but I was interested, and I think this was seriously delusional. (Laughter) Secondly, we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter. Maybe it would be a study when we weren't having an atomic war, or you could use it as a TV room, or, as many teenagers found out, a very, very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend. And actually — so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters. Or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground. Now, the bomb shelters at that point — let's say you bought a prefab one — it would be a few hundred dollars, maybe up to 500, if you got a fancy one. Yet, what percentage of Americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house? What percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter? Less than two percent. About 1.4 percent of the population, as far as anyone knows, did anything, either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter. Many buildings, public buildings, around the country — this is New York City — had these little civil defense signs, and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry. And one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as we now know, and are well aware of their behaviors from Katrina. Here is their first big public announcement. They would propose — actually there were about six volumes written on this — a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the United States having three to four days warning that the Soviets were going to attack us. So the goal was to evacuate the target cities. We would move people out of the target cities into the countryside. And I'm telling you, I actually testified at the Senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate, and actually have three or four days' warning. It was just completely off the wall. Turns out that they had another idea behind it, even though this was — they were telling the public it was to save us. The idea was that we would force the Soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons — very expensive — and potentially double their arsenal, to not only take out the original site, but take out sites where people were going. This was what apparently, as it turns out, was behind all this. It was just really, really frightening. The main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality. The civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we'd see in all-out nuclear war. So organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility, around 1979, started saying this a lot publicly. They would do a bombing run. They'd go to your city, and they'd say, "Here's a map of your city. Here's what's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit." So no possibility of medical response to, or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war. So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive. This disconnect was never actually resolved. And what happened was — when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era, which started back in 1945. Chapter two starts in 1991. When the Soviet Union broke up, we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the United States, for the most part. It's not completely gone. I'm going to come back to that. But from 1991 through the present time, emphasized by the attacks of 2001, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event, act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the scenario has changed very considerably, the fact is that we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means. So I'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second. So, what is a nuclear terror threat? And there's four key ingredients to describing that. First thing is that the global nuclear weapons, in the stockpiles that I showed you in those original maps, happen to be not uniformly secure. And it's particularly not secure in the former Soviet Union, now in Russia. There are many, many sites where warheads are stored and, in fact, lots of sites where fissionable materials, like highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are absolutely not safe. They're available to be bought, stolen, whatever. They're acquirable, let me put it that way. From 1993 through 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon. The global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300, at the low end, to about 2,100 metric tons. More than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure Russian facilities. How much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb? Well, you need about 75 pounds of it. So, what I'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is not a product placement. It's just — in fact, if I was Coca Cola, I'd be pretty distressed about this — (Laughter) — but basically, this is it. This is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in Hiroshima. Now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb. That — you'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium. Now, plutonium, 10 to 13 pounds: this. This is enough plutonium to create a Nagasaki-size atomic weapon. Now this situation, already I — you know, I don't really like thinking about this, although somehow I got myself a job where I have to think about it. So the point is that we're very, very insecure in terms of developing this material. The second thing is, what about the know-how? And there's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon. Well, there's a lot of know-how out there. There's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there. There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb. There are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it. All of this information is relatively available. If you have an undergraduate degree in physics, I would suggest — although I don't, so maybe it's not even true — but something close to that would allow you, with the information that's currently available, to actually build a nuclear weapon. The third element of the nuclear terror threat is that, who would actually do such a thing? Well, what we're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized. They are very dedicated and committed. They are stateless. Somebody once said, Al Qaeda does not have a return address, so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, what's the response, and to whom is the response? And they're retaliation-proof. Since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference, since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us, it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work. Here is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Sulaiman was a key lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden. He wrote many, many times statements to this effect: "we have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of whom should be children." And we don't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm, for whatever their reasons. McVeigh and Nichols, and the Oklahoma City attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists. What if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon? The fourth element is that the high-value U.S. targets are accessible, soft and plentiful. This would be a talk for another day, but the level of the preparedness that the United States has achieved since 9/11 of '01 is unbelievably inadequate. What you saw after Katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the United States is for any kind of major attack. Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected — five to seven percent. This is Alexander Lebed, who was a general that worked with Yeltsin, who talked about, and presented to Congress, this idea that the Russians had developed — these suitcase bombs. They were very low yield — 0.1 to one kiloton, Hiroshima was around 13 kilotons — but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage. And Lebed came to the United States and told us that many, many — more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable. And they look like this. They're basically very simple arrangements. You put the elements into a suitcase. It becomes very portable. The suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car. You take it wherever you want to take it, and you can detonate it. You don't want to build a suitcase bomb, and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist. This is the size of the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped at Hiroshima. It was 9.8 feet long, weighed 8,800 pounds. You go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so, you rent a truck that's got the right capacity, and you take your bomb, you put it in the truck and you're ready to go. It could happen. But what it would mean and who would survive? You can't get an exact number for that kind of probability, but what I'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening. Anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves. I think there's a lot of people in the intelligence community — a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it's almost inevitable, unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk, like better interdiction, better prevention, better fixing, you know, better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth. There's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer. At this particular moment, we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. I don't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon, although even that is not completely off the table. There's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the Earth many, many times over. There are flash points in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in North Korea, other places where the use of nuclear weapons, while initially locally, could very rapidly go into a situation where we'd be facing all-out nuclear war. It's very unsettling. Here we go. OK. I'm back in my truck, and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're coming down, and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here, in the Financial District. This is a 10-kiloton bomb, slightly smaller than was used in Hiroshima. And I want to just conclude this by just giving you some information. I think — "news you could use" kind of concept here. So, first of all, this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine. This is the ultimate. And if you're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off, you have a 90 percent chance of not making it. If you're right where the bomb went off, you will be vaporized. And that's — I'm just telling you, this is not good. (Laughter) You assume that. Two-mile radius, you have a 50 percent chance of being killed, and up to about eight miles away — now I'm talking about killed instantly — somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed. The thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is — first of all, tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the core here, where it goes off, and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat, acute radiation and blast effects. An enormous hurricane-like wind, and destruction of buildings almost totally, within this yellow circle here. And what I'm going to focus on, as I come to conclusion here, is that, what happens to you if you're in here? Well, if we're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack, you, up here, are as dead as the people here. So it was a moot point. My point now, though, is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here, if you've survived the initial blast. You have, when the blast goes off — and by the way, if it ever comes up, don't look at it. (Laughter) If you look at it, you're going to be blind, either temporarily or permanently. So if there's any way that you can avoid, like, avert your eyes, that would be a good thing. If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have — that's gone off — you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up. In that 10 to 15 minutes, all you have to do — and I mean this seriously — is go about a mile away from the blast. And what happens is — this is — I'm going to show you now some fallout plumes. Within 20 minutes, it comes straight down. Within 24 hours, lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds, and it's mostly in this particular direction — it's going northeast. And if you're in this vicinity, you've got to get away. So you're feeling the wind — and there's tremendous wind now that you're going to be feeling — and you want to go perpendicular to the wind [not upwind or downwind]. if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you. You've got to get out of there. If you don't get out of there, you're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order. If you can't get out of there, we want you to go into a shelter and stay there. Now, in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible, or you have to be on a floor — on a high floor — if it's a ground burst explosion, which it would be, higher than the ninth floor. So you have to be tenth floor or higher, or in the basement. But basically, you've got to get out of town as quickly as possible. And if you do that, you actually can survive a nuclear blast. Over the next few days to a week, there will be a radiation cloud, again, going with the wind, and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out — in this case, over Long Island. And if you're in the direct fallout zone here, you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there, and that's clear. But if you are sheltered, you can actually survive. The difference between knowing information of what you're going to do personally, and not knowing information, can save your life, and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from something like this and half a million to 700,000 fatalities. So, response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential. But in 2008, there isn't one single American city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed. You say "nuclear" to them, and they're thinking, "Oh my God, we're all gone. What's the point? It's futile." And we're trying to tell them, "It's not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things." So the goal here is to minimize fatalities. And I just want to leave you with the personal points that I think you might be interested in. The key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out, and not going into harm's way. That's basically all we're going to be talking about here. And the farther you are away in distance, the longer it is in time from the initial blast; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere, the better. So separation — hopefully with dirt or concrete, or being in a basement — distance and time is what will save you. So here's what you do. First of all, as I said, don't stare at the light flash, if you can. I don't know you could possibly resist doing that. But let's assume, theoretically, you want to do that. You want to keep your mouth open, so your eardrums don't burst from the pressures. If you're very close to what happened, you actually do have to duck and cover, like Bert told you, Bert the Turtle. And you want to get under something so that you're not injured or killed by objects, if that's at all possible. You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes. And shelter and place. You want to move [only] crosswind for 1.2 miles. You know, if you're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction, less destroyed here, then you know that it was over there, the blast, and you're going this way, as long as you're going crosswise to the wind. Once you're out and evacuating, you want to keep as much of your skin, your mouth and nose covered, as long as that covering doesn't impede you moving and getting out of there. And finally, you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible. And if you're wearing clothing, you've taken off your clothing, you're going to get showered down some place and remove the radiation that would be — the radioactive material that might be on you. And then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum, but you're going to wait hopefully — you'll have your little wind-up, battery-less radio, and you'll be waiting for people to tell you when it's safe to go outside. That's what you need to do. In conclusion, nuclear war is less likely than before, but by no means out of the question, and it's not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is possible — it may be probable — but is survivable. And this is Jack Geiger, who's one of the heroes of the U.S. public health community. And Jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything, whether it's war or terrorism, is abolition of nuclear weapons. And you want something to work on once you've fixed global warming, I urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable, inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world. Now, this is my favorite civil defense slide, and I — (Laughter) — I don't want to be indelicate, but this — he's no longer in office. We don't really care, OK. This was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures, but the fact of the matter is that America's gone through a very hard time. We've not been focused, we've not done what we had to do, and now we're facing the potential of bad, hell on Earth. Thank you.

A free digital library

Brewster Kahle

{0: 'Brewster Kahle'}

{0: ['digital librarian']}

{0: 'Brewster Kahle is an inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian. His Internet Archive offers 85 billion pieces of deep Web geology -- a fascinating look at the formation of the Internet over the years, and a challenge to those who would keep knowledge buried.'}

2007-12-12

2008-09-10

EG 2007

en

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

['design', 'entertainment', 'film', 'history', 'library', 'media', 'music', 'technology', 'web', 'books', 'Best of the Web']

{319: 'The next 5,000 days of the web', 339: 'The web is more than "better TV"', 216: 'The new power of collaboration', 24414: "What's the fastest way to alphabetize your bookshelf?", 57918: 'Why books are here to stay', 27750: "A librarian's case against overdue book fines"}

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

Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -- every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history ... It's all free to the public -- unless someone else gets to it first.

We really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don't do that, we're going to get the generation we deserve. They're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them. And we, as now the elite, parents, librarians, professionals, whatever it is, a bunch of our activities are, in fact, in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us, or as broadly as we can. I'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone. One is what's on the Boston Public Library. Carved above their door is, "Free to All." It's kind of an inspiring statement, and I'll go back at the end of this. I'm a librarian, and what I'm trying to do is bring all of the works of knowledge to as many people as want to read it. And the idea of using technology is perfect for us. I think we have the opportunity to one-up the Greeks. It's not easy to one-up the Greeks. But with the industriousness of the Egyptians, they were able to build the Library of Alexandria — the idea of a copy of every book of all the peoples of the world. The problem was you actually had to go to Alexandria to go to it. On the other hand, if you did, then great things happened. I think we can one-up the Greeks and achieve something. And I'm going to try to argue only one point today: that universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp. So if I'm successful, then you'll actually come away thinking, yeah, we could actually achieve the great vision of everything ever published, everything that was ever meant for distribution, available to anybody in the world that's ever wanted to have access to it. Yes, there's issues about how money should be distributed, and that's still being refigured out. But I'd say there's plenty of money, and there's plenty of demand, so we can actually achieve that. But I'm going to go over the technological, social and sort of where are we as a whole, trying to get to that particular vision. And the way I'm going to try to do this is do it like the Amazon.com website, the books, music, video and just go step — media type by media type, just go and say, all right, how're we doing on this? So if we start with books, you know, sort of where are we? Well, first you have to, as an engineer, scope the problem. How big is it? If you wanted to put all of the published works online so that anybody could have it available, well, how big a problem is it? Well, we don't really know, but the largest print library in the world is the Library of Congress. It's 26 million volumes, 26 million volumes. It is, by far and away, the largest print library in the world. And a book, if you had a book, is about a megabyte, so — you know, if you had it in Microsoft Word. So a megabyte, 26 million megabytes is 26 terabytes — it goes mega-, giga-, tera-. 26 terabytes. 26 terabytes fits in a computer system that's about this big, on spinning Linux drives, and it costs about 60,000 dollars. So for the cost of a house — or around here, a garage — you can put, you can have spinning all of the words in the Library of Congress. That's pretty neat. Then the question is, what do you get? You know, is it worth trying to get there? Do you actually want it online? Some of the first things that people do is they make book readers that allow you to search inside the books, and that's kind of fun. And you can download these things, and look around them in new and different ways. And you can get at them remotely, if you happen to have a laptop. There's starting to be some of these sort of page turn-y interfaces that look a whole lot like books in certain ways, and you can search them, make little tabs, and it's kind of cute — still very book-like — on your laptop. But I don't know, reading things on a laptop — whenever I pull up my laptop, it always feels like work. I think that's one of the reasons why the Kindle is so great. I don't have to feel like I'm at work to read a Kindle. It's starting to be a little bit more specified. But I have to say that there's older technologies that I tend to like. I like the physical book. And I think we can go and use our technology to go and digitize things, put them on the Net, and then download, print them and bind them, and end up with books again. And we sort of said, well, how hard is this? And it turns out to not be very hard. We actually went off to make a bookmobile. And a bookmobile — the size of a van with a satellite dish, a printer, binder and cutter, and kids make their own books. It costs about three dollars to download, print and bind a normal, old book. And they actually come out kind of nice looking. You can actually get really good-looking books for on the order of one penny per page, sort of the parts cost for doing this. So the idea of — this technology actually may end up putting books back in people's hands again. There are some other bookmobiles running around. This is Eric Eldred making books at Walden Pond — Thoreau's works. This is just before he got kicked out by the Parks Services, for competing with the bookstore there. In India, they've got another couple bookmobiles running around. And this is the opening day at the Library of Alexandria, the new Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It was quite popularly attended. And kids starting to make their own books, and a happy kid with the first book that he's ever owned. So the idea of being able to use this technology to end up with paper where I can handle sort of sounds a little retro, but I think it still has its place. And being from the Silicon Valley, sort of utopian sort of world, we thought, if we can make this technology work in rural Uganda, we might have something. So we actually got some funding from the World Bank to try it out. And we found in about 30 days we could go and take a couple folks from Silicon Valley, fly them to Uganda, buy a car, set up the first Internet connection at the National Library of Uganda, figure out what they wanted, and get a program going making books in rural Uganda. And it actually — so technologically, it works. What we found out of this is we didn't have the right books. So the books were in the library. We could get it to people, if they're digitized, but we didn't know how to quite get them digitized. Everybody thought the answer is, send things to India and China. And so we've tried that, and I'll go over that in a moment. There are some newer technologies for delivering that have happened that are actually quite exciting as well. One is a print-on-demand machine that looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. We have one of these things now. It's completely cool. It's all conveyor belt, and it makes a book. And it's called the "Espresso Book Machine," and in about 10 minutes, you can press a button and make a book. Something else I'm quite excited about in this particular domain, beyond these sort of kiosk-y things where you can get books on demand, is some of these new little screens that are coming out. And one of my favorites in this is the $100 laptop. And I don't mean to steal any thunder here, but we've gone and used one of these things to be an e-book reader. So here's one of the beta units and you can — it actually turns out to be a really good-looking e-book reader. And we have a quick hack that we did to try to put one of our books on it, and it turns out that 200 dots per inch means that you can put scanned books on them that look really good. At 200 dots per inch, it's kind of the equivalent of a 300 dot print laser printer. We're in good enough shape. You actually can go and read scanned books quite easily. So the idea of electronic books is starting to come about. But how do you go about doing all this scanning? So we thought, okay, well, let's try out this send books to India thing. And there was a project with, funded by the National Science Foundation — sent a bunch of scanners, and the American libraries were supposed to send books. Well, they didn't. They didn't want to send their books. So we bought 100,000 books and sent them to India. And then we learned why you don't want to send books to India. The lesson we learned out of this is, scan your own books. If you really care about books, you're going to scan them better, especially if they're valuable books. If they're new books and you can just, you know, butcher them, because you could just buy another one, that's not such a big deal in terms of doing high-quality scanning. But do things that you love. But the Indians have been scanning a lot of their own books — about 300,000 now — doing very well. The Chinese did over a million, and the Egyptians are about 30,000. But we sent — thought, OK, if we're going to need to do this, let's do it in-library. How do we go and do this, and how do we get it down so that it's a cost point that we could afford? And we sort of picked the price point of 10 cents a page. If it's basically the cost of xeroxing to basically digitize, OCR, package it up, make it so that you could download, print and bind it — the whole shebang — we would have achieved something. So we started out trying to figure out. How do we get to 10 cents? And we tried these robot things, and they worked pretty well — sort of these auto-page-turning things. If we can have Mars Rovers, you'd think you could turn pages. But it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages, and the volume isn't there. So anyway — so we ended up making our own book scanner, and with two digital, high-grade, professional digital cameras, controlled museum lighting, so even if it's a black and white book, you can go and get the proper intonation. So you basically do a beautiful, respectful job. This is not a fax, this is — the idea is to do a beautiful job as you're going through these libraries. And we've been able to achieve 10 cents a page if we run things in volume. This is what it looks like at the University of Toronto. And actually, it turns out to, you know, pay a living wage. People seem to love it. Yes, it's a little boring, but some people kind of get into the Zen of it. (Laughter) And especially if it's kind of interesting books that you care about, in languages that you can read. We actually have been able to do a pretty good job of this, at getting 10 cents a page. So 10 cents a page, 300 pages in your average book, 30 dollars a book. The Library of Congress, if you did the whole darn thing — 26 million books — is about 750 million dollars, right? But a million books, I think, actually would be a pretty good start, and that would cost 30 million dollars. That's not that big a bill. And what we've been able to do is get into libraries. We've now got eight of these scanning centers in three countries, and libraries are up for having their books scanned. The Getty here is moving their books to the UCLA, which is where we have one these scanning centers, and scanning their out-of-copyright books, which is fabulous. So we're starting to get the institutional responsibility. The thing we're missing is the 10 cents. If we can get the 10 cents, all the rest of it flows. We've scanned about 200,000 books. Now we're scanning about 15,000 books a month, and it's starting to gear up another factor of two from there. So all in all, that's going very well. And we're starting to move out of the just out-of-copyright into the out-of-print world. So I think of — we're kind of going from the out-of-copyright, library stuff, and Amazon.com is coming from the in-print world. And I think we'll meet in the middle some place, and have the classic thing that you have, which is a publishing system and a library system working in parallel. And so we're starting up a program to do out-of-print works, but loaning them. Exactly what loaning means, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, loaning out-of-print works from the Boston Public Library, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a few other libraries that are starting to participate in this program, to try out this model of where does a library stop and where does the bookstore take over. So all in all, it's possible to do this in large scale. We're also going back over microfilm and getting that online. So, we can do 10 cents a page, we're going 15,000 books a month and we've got about 250,000 books online, counting all the other projects that are starting to add in. So what I wanted to argue is, books are within our grasp. The idea of taking on the whole ball of wax is not that big a deal. Yes, it costs tens of millions, low hundreds of millions, but one time shot and we've got basically the history of printed literature online. And then, there's business model issues about how to try to effectively market it and get it to people. But it is within our grasp, technologically and law-wise, at least for the out of print and out of copyright, we suggest, to be able to get the whole darn thing online. Now let's go for audio, and I'm going to go through these. So how much is there? Well, as best we can tell, there are about two to three million disks having been published — so 78s, long-playing records and CDs — or at least that's the largest archives of published materials we've been able to sort of point at. It costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online, if you're doing things in volume. But we've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny. This is a fairly heavily litigated area, so we've found that there are niches in the music world that aren't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system. And we've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the Net. In the United States, it doesn't cost you to give something away. Right? If you give something to a charity or to the public, you get a pat on the back and a tax donation — except on the Net, where you can go broke. If you put up a video of your garage band, and it starts getting heavily accessed, you can lose your guitars or your house. This doesn't make any sense. So we've offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free, to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library. And we've been getting a lot of takers. One is the rock 'n' rollers. The rock 'n' rollers had a tradition of sharing, as long as nobody made any money. You could — concert recordings, it's not the commercial recordings, but concert recordings, started by the Grateful Dead. And we get about two or three bands a day signing up. They give permission, and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day. We have about 40,000 concerts, everything the Grateful Dead ever did, up on the Net, so that people can see it and listen to this material. So audio is possible to put up, but the rights issues are really pretty thorny. We've got a lot of collections now — a couple hundred thousand items — and it's growing over time. Moving images: if you think of theatrical releases, there are not that many of them. As best we can tell, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution. It's just not that many. But half of those were Indian. But anyway, it's doable, but we've only found about a thousand of these things that — to be out of copyright. So we've digitized those and made those available. But we've found that there's lots of other types of movies that haven't really seen the light of day — archival films. We've found, also, a lot of political films, a lot of amateur films, all sorts of things that are basically needing a home, a permanent home. So we've been starting to make these available and it's grown to be very popular. We're not quite a YouTube. We tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies, which has just been great fun. Television comes quite a bit larger. We started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day. It's sort of the biggest TiVo box you've ever seen. It's about a petabyte, so far, of worldwide television — Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC — 24 hours a day. We only put one week up, which is mostly for cost reasons, which is the 9/11, sort of from 9/11/2001. For one week, what did the world see? CNN was saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at the Palestinian television and find out. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? And television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable, except by Jon Stewart, who does a fabulous job. So anyway, television is, I would suggest, within our grasp. So 15 dollars per video hour, and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour, we're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the Net. And we've got, now, a lot of these materials. So we've got about 100,000 pieces up there. So books, music, video, software. There's only 50,000 titles of it. Mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections. But we've worked through some of those, but we've still got real problems in Washington. Well, we're best known as the World Wide Web. We've been archiving the World Wide Web since 1996. We take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it, every two months. And actually, it's really been pioneered by Alexa Internet, which donates this collection to the Internet Archive. And it's been growing along for the last 11 years, and it's a fantastic resource. And we've made a Wayback Machine that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were. If you go and search on something — this is Google.com, the different versions of it that we have, this is what it looks like when it was an alpha release, and this is what it looked like at Stanford. So anyway, you've got basically an idea of where things came from. Mostly, people want to see their old stuff out of this. If there's one thing that we want to learn from the Library of Alexandria version one, which is probably best known for burning, is, don't just have one copy. So we've started to — we've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the Library of Alexandria. So this is a picture of the Internet Archive at the Library of Alexandria. And we now have also another copy building up in Amsterdam. So, we should put it in the San Andreas Fault Line in San Francisco, flood zone in Amsterdam and in the Middle East. Right, so anyway ... so we're hedging our bets here. If we go and put it in a couple more places, I think we'll be in good shape. There's a political and social question out of this. Is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There's some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is, is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So universal access to all knowledge — I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon, or the Gutenberg Bible, or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for, for millennia, for having achieved. And as I said before, I'll end with something that's carved above the door of the Carnegie Library. Carnegie — one of the great capitalists of this country — carved above his legacy, "Free to the People." Thank you very much.

Life in the deep oceans

David Gallo

{0: 'David Gallo'}

{0: ['oceanographer']}

{0: 'A pioneer in ocean exploration, David Gallo is an enthusiastic ambassador between the sea and those of us on dry land.'}

1998-02-28

2008-09-11

TED1998

en

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

['animals', 'geology', 'life', 'oceans', 'science', 'submarine', 'technology', 'marine biology']

{40: 'The story of life in photographs', 77: 'The shrimp with a kick!', 261: 'A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows', 264: 'The astonishing hidden world of the deep ocean', 1387: 'Deep ocean mysteries and wonders', 1372: 'A census of the ocean'}

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

With vibrant video clips captured by submarines, David Gallo takes us to some of Earth's darkest, most violent, toxic and beautiful habitats, the valleys and volcanic ridges of the oceans' depths, where life is bizarre, resilient and shockingly abundant.

(Applause) David Gallo: This is Bill Lange. I'm Dave Gallo. And we're going to tell you some stories from the sea here in video. We've got some of the most incredible video of Titanic that's ever been seen, and we're not going to show you any of it. (Laughter) The truth of the matter is that the Titanic — even though it's breaking all sorts of box office records — it's not the most exciting story from the sea. And the problem, I think, is that we take the ocean for granted. When you think about it, the oceans are 75 percent of the planet. Most of the planet is ocean water. The average depth is about two miles. Part of the problem, I think, is we stand at the beach, or we see images like this of the ocean, and you look out at this great big blue expanse, and it's shimmering and it's moving and there's waves and there's surf and there's tides, but you have no idea for what lies in there. And in the oceans, there are the longest mountain ranges on the planet. Most of the animals are in the oceans. Most of the earthquakes and volcanoes are in the sea, at the bottom of the sea. The biodiversity and the biodensity in the ocean is higher, in places, than it is in the rainforests. It's mostly unexplored, and yet there are beautiful sights like this that captivate us and make us become familiar with it. But when you're standing at the beach, I want you to think that you're standing at the edge of a very unfamiliar world. We have to have a very special technology to get into that unfamiliar world. We use the submarine Alvin and we use cameras, and the cameras are something that Bill Lange has developed with the help of Sony. Marcel Proust said, "The true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes." People that have partnered with us have given us new eyes, not only on what exists — the new landscapes at the bottom of the sea — but also how we think about life on the planet itself. Here's a jelly. It's one of my favorites, because it's got all sorts of working parts. This turns out to be the longest creature in the oceans. It gets up to about 150 feet long. But see all those different working things? I love that kind of stuff. It's got these fishing lures on the bottom. They're going up and down. It's got tentacles dangling, swirling around like that. It's a colonial animal. These are all individual animals banding together to make this one creature. And it's got these jet thrusters up in front that it'll use in a moment, and a little light. If you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that, put them on one side of the scale, put all the jelly-type of animals on the other side, those guys win hands down. Most of the biomass in the ocean is made out of creatures like this. Here's the X-wing death jelly. (Laughter) The bioluminescence — they use the lights for attracting mates and attracting prey and communicating. We couldn't begin to show you our archival stuff from the jellies. They come in all different sizes and shapes. Bill Lange: We tend to forget about the fact that the ocean is miles deep on average, and that we're real familiar with the animals that are in the first 200 or 300 feet, but we're not familiar with what exists from there all the way down to the bottom. And these are the types of animals that live in that three-dimensional space, that micro-gravity environment that we really haven't explored. You hear about giant squid and things like that, but some of these animals get up to be approximately 140, 160 feet long. They're very little understood. DG: This is one of them, another one of our favorites, because it's a little octopod. You can actually see through his head. And here he is, flapping with his ears and very gracefully going up. We see those at all depths and even at the greatest depths. They go from a couple of inches to a couple of feet. They come right up to the submarine — they'll put their eyes right up to the window and peek inside the sub. This is really a world within a world, and we're going to show you two. In this case, we're passing down through the mid-ocean and we see creatures like this. This is kind of like an undersea rooster. This guy, that looks incredibly formal, in a way. And then one of my favorites. What a face! This is basically scientific data that you're looking at. It's footage that we've collected for scientific purposes. And that's one of the things that Bill's been doing, is providing scientists with this first view of animals like this, in the world where they belong. They don't catch them in a net. They're actually looking at them down in that world. We're going to take a joystick, sit in front of our computer, on the Earth, and press the joystick forward, and fly around the planet. We're going to look at the mid-ocean ridge, a 40,000-mile long mountain range. The average depth at the top of it is about a mile and a half. And we're over the Atlantic — that's the ridge right there — but we're going to go across the Caribbean, Central America, and end up against the Pacific, nine degrees north. We make maps of these mountain ranges with sound, with sonar, and this is one of those mountain ranges. We're coming around a cliff here on the right. The height of these mountains on either side of this valley is greater than the Alps in most cases. And there's tens of thousands of those mountains out there that haven't been mapped yet. This is a volcanic ridge. We're getting down further and further in scale. And eventually, we can come up with something like this. This is an icon of our robot, Jason, it's called. And you can sit in a room like this, with a joystick and a headset, and drive a robot like that around the bottom of the ocean in real time. One of the things we're trying to do at Woods Hole with our partners is to bring this virtual world — this world, this unexplored region — back to the laboratory. Because we see it in bits and pieces right now. We see it either as sound, or we see it as video, or we see it as photographs, or we see it as chemical sensors, but we never have yet put it all together into one interesting picture. Here's where Bill's cameras really do shine. This is what's called a hydrothermal vent. And what you're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed, hydrogen-sulfide-rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor. Gets up to 600, 700 degrees F, somewhere in that range. So that's all water under the sea — a mile and a half, two miles, three miles down. And we knew it was volcanic back in the '60s, '70s. And then we had some hint that these things existed all along the axis of it, because if you've got volcanism, water's going to get down from the sea into cracks in the sea floor, come in contact with magma, and come shooting out hot. We weren't really aware that it would be so rich with sulfides, hydrogen sulfides. We didn't have any idea about these things, which we call chimneys. This is one of these hydrothermal vents. Six hundred degree F water coming out of the Earth. On either side of us are mountain ranges that are higher than the Alps, so the setting here is very dramatic. BL: The white material is a type of bacteria that thrives at 180 degrees C. DG: I think that's one of the greatest stories right now that we're seeing from the bottom of the sea, is that the first thing we see coming out of the sea floor after a volcanic eruption is bacteria. And we started to wonder for a long time, how did it all get down there? What we find out now is that it's probably coming from inside the Earth. Not only is it coming out of the Earth — so, biogenesis made from volcanic activity — but that bacteria supports these colonies of life. The pressure here is 4,000 pounds per square inch. A mile and a half from the surface to two miles to three miles — no sun has ever gotten down here. All the energy to support these life forms is coming from inside the Earth — so, chemosynthesis. And you can see how dense the population is. These are called tube worms. BL: These worms have no digestive system. They have no mouth. But they have two types of gill structures. One for extracting oxygen out of the deep-sea water, another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria, which takes the hydrothermal fluid — that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom — and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest. DG: You can see, here's a crab that lives down there. He's managed to grab a tip of these worms. Now, they normally retract as soon as a crab touches them. Oh! Good going. So, as soon as a crab touches them, they retract down into their shells, just like your fingernails. There's a whole story being played out here that we're just now beginning to have some idea of because of this new camera technology. BL: These worms live in a real temperature extreme. Their foot is at about 200 degrees C and their head is out at three degrees C, so it's like having your hand in boiling water and your foot in freezing water. That's how they like to live. (Laughter) DG: This is a female of this kind of worm. And here's a male. You watch. It doesn't take long before two guys here — this one and one that will show up over here — start to fight. Everything you see is played out in the pitch black of the deep sea. There are never any lights there, except the lights that we bring. Here they go. On one of the last dive series, we counted 200 species in these areas — 198 were new, new species. BL: One of the big problems is that for the biologists working at these sites, it's rather difficult to collect these animals. And they disintegrate on the way up, so the imagery is critical for the science. DG: Two octopods at about two miles depth. This pressure thing really amazes me — that these animals can exist there at a depth with pressure enough to crush the Titanic like an empty Pepsi can. What we saw up till now was from the Pacific. This is from the Atlantic. Even greater depth. You can see this shrimp is harassing this poor little guy here, and he'll bat it away with his claw. Whack! (Laughter) And the same thing's going on over here. What they're getting at is that — on the back of this crab — the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals. And what these shrimp are trying to do is actually harvest the bacteria from the backs of these animals. And the crabs don't like it at all. These long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria. So, the bacteria grows hair on the crab. On the back, you see this again. The red dot is the laser light of the submarine Alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents. Those are all shrimp. You see the hot water over here, here and here, coming out. They're clinging to a rock face and actually scraping bacteria off that rock face. Here's a tiny, little vent that's come out of the side of that pillar. Those pillars get up to several stories. So here, you've got this valley with this incredible alien landscape of pillars and hot springs and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, inhabited by these very strange animals that live only on chemical energy coming out of the ground. They don't need the sun at all. BL: You see this white V-shaped mark on the back of the shrimp? It's actually a light-sensing organ. It's how they find the hydrothermal vents. The vents are emitting a black body radiation — an IR signature — and so they're able to find these vents at considerable distances. DG: All this stuff is happening along that 40,000-mile long mountain range that we're calling the ribbon of life, because just even today, as we speak, there's life being generated there from volcanic activity. This is the first time we've ever tried this any place. We're going to try to show you high definition from the Pacific. We're moving up one of these pillars. This one's several stories tall. In it, you'll see that it's a habitat for a lot of different animals. There's a funny kind of hot plate here, with vent water coming out of it. So all of these are individual homes for worms. Now here's a closer view of that community. Here's crabs here, worms here. There are smaller animals crawling around. Here's pagoda structures. I think this is the neatest-looking thing. I just can't get over this — that you've got these little chimneys sitting here smoking away. This stuff is toxic as hell, by the way. You could never get a permit to dump this in the ocean, and it's coming out all from it. (Laughter) It's unbelievable. It's basically sulfuric acid, and it's being just dumped out, at incredible rates. And animals are thriving — and we probably came from here. That's probably where we evolved from. BL: This bacteria that we've been talking about turns out to be the most simplest form of life found. There are a number of groups that are proposing that life evolved at these vent sites. Although the vent sites are short-lived — an individual site may last only 10 years or so — as an ecosystem they've been stable for millions — well, billions — of years. DG: It works too well. You see there're some fish inside here as well. There's a fish sitting here. Here's a crab with his claw right at the end of that tube worm, waiting for that worm to stick his head out. (Laughter) BL: The biologists right now cannot explain why these animals are so active. The worms are growing inches per week! DG: I already said that this site, from a human perspective, is toxic as hell. Not only that, but on top — the lifeblood — that plumbing system turns off every year or so. Their plumbing system turns off, so the sites have to move. And then there's earthquakes, and then volcanic eruptions, on the order of one every five years, that completely wipes the area out. Despite that, these animals grow back in about a year's time. You're talking about biodensities and biodiversity, again, higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life. Is it sensitive? Yes. Is it fragile? No, it's not really very fragile. I'll end up with saying one thing. There's a story in the sea, in the waters of the sea, in the sediments and the rocks of the sea floor. It's an incredible story. What we see when we look back in time, in those sediments and rocks, is a record of Earth history. Everything on this planet — everything — works by cycles and rhythms. The continents move apart. They come back together. Oceans come and go. Mountains come and go. Glaciers come and go. El Nino comes and goes. It's not a disaster, it's rhythmic. What we're learning now, it's almost like a symphony. It's just like music — it really is just like music. And what we're learning now is that you can't listen to a five-billion-year long symphony, get to today and say, "Stop! We want tomorrow's note to be the same as it was today." It's absurd. It's just absurd. So, what we've got to learn now is to find out where this planet's going at all these different scales and work with it. Learn to manage it. The concept of preservation is futile. Conservation's tougher, but we can probably get there. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

Once upon a time, my mother ...

Carmen Agra Deedy

{0: 'Carmen Agra Deedy'}

{0: ['storyteller']}

{0: "Carmen Agra Deedy's luminous, funny, digressive tales of childhood and adulthood bring out the starry-eyed listener in us all."}

2005-02-02

2008-09-12

TED2005

en

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

['children', 'entertainment', 'memory', 'storytelling']

{60: 'Four American characters', 26: 'If I controlled the Internet', 86: 'Letting go of God', 1048: "The 3 A's of awesome", 30: 'Surprising stats about child carseats', 1715: 'In search of the man who broke my neck'}

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

Storyteller Carmen Agra Deedy spins a funny, wise and luminous tale of parents and kids, starring her Cuban mother. Settle in and enjoy the ride -- Mama's driving!

When I knew I was going to come to speak to you, I thought, "I gotta call my mother." I have a little Cuban mother — she's about that big. Four feet. Nothing larger than the sum of her figurative parts. You still with me? (Laughter) I called her up. "Hello, how're you doing, baby?" "Hey, ma, I got to talk to you." "You're talking to me already. What's the matter?" I said, "I've got to talk to a bunch of nice people." "You're always talking to nice people, except when you went to the White House." "Ma, don't start!" And I told her I was coming to TED, and she said, "What's the problem?" And I said, "Well, I'm not sure." I said, "I have to talk to them about stories. It's 'Technology, Entertainment and Design.'" And she said, "Well, you design a story when you make it up, it's entertainment when you tell it, and you're going to use a microphone." (Laughter) I said, "You're a peach, ma. Pop there?" "What's the matter? The pearls of wisdom leaping from my lips like lemmings is no good for you?" (Laughter) Then my pop got on there. My pop, he's one of the old souls, you know — old Cuban man from Camaguey. Camaguey is a province in Cuba. He's from Florida. He was born there in 1924. He grew up in a bohio of dirt floors, and the structure was the kind used by the Tainos, our old Arawak ancestors. My father is at once quick-witted, wickedly funny, and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless. "Papi, help." "I already heard your mother. I think she's right." (Laughter) "After what I just told you?" My whole life, my father's been there. So we talked for a few minutes, and he said, "Why don't you tell them what you believe?" I love that, but we don't have the time. Good storytelling is crafting a story that someone wants to listen to. Great story is the art of letting go. So I'm going to tell you a little story. Remember, this tradition comes to us not from the mists of Avalon, back in time, but further still, before we were scratching out these stories on papyrus, or we were doing the pictographs on walls in moist, damp caves. Back then, we had an urge, a need, to tell the story. When Lexus wants to sell you a car, they're telling you a story. Have you been watching the commercials? Because every one of us has this desire, for once — just once — to tell our story and have it heard. There are stories you tell from stages. There's stories that you may tell in a small group of people with some good wine. And there's stories you tell late at night to a friend, maybe once in your life. And then there are stories that we whisper into a Stygian darkness. I'm not telling you that story. I'm telling you this one. It's called, "You're Going to Miss Me." It's about human connection. My Cuban mother, which I just briefly introduced you to in that short character sketch, came to the United States one thousand years ago. I was born in 19 — I forget, and I came to this country with them in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution. We went from Havana, Cuba to Decatur, Georgia. And Decatur, Georgia's a small Southern town. And in that little Southern town, I grew up, and grew up hearing these stories. But this story only happened a few years ago. I called my mom. It was a Saturday morning. And I was calling about how to make ajiaco. It's a Cuban meal. It's delicious. It's savory. It makes spit froth in the little corners of your mouth — is that enough? It makes your armpits juicy, you know? That kind of food, yeah. This is the sensory part of the program, people. I called my mother, and she said, "Carmen, I need you to come, please. I need to go to the mall, and you know your father now, he takes a nap in the afternoon, and I got to go. I got an errand to run." Let me parenthetically pause here and tell you — Esther, my mother, had stopped driving several years ago, to the collective relief of the entire city of Atlanta. Any vehicular outing with that woman from the time I was a young child, guys, naturally included flashing, blue lights. But she'd become adept at dodging the boys in blue, and when she did meet them, oh, she had wonderful, well, rapport. "Ma'am, did you know that was a light you just ran?" (Spanish) "You don't speak English?" "No." (Laughter) But eventually, every dog has its day, and she ended up in traffic court, where she bartered with the judge for a discount. There's a historical marker. But now she was a septuagenarian, she'd stopped driving. And that meant that everyone in the family had to sign up to take her to have her hair dyed, you know, that peculiar color of blue that matches her polyester pants suit, you know, same color as the Buick. Anybody? All right. Little picks on the legs, where she does her needlepoint, and leaves little loops. Rockports — they're for this. That's why they call them that. (Laughter) This is her ensemble. And this is the woman that wants me to come on a Saturday morning when I have a lot to do, but it doesn't take long because Cuban guilt is a weighty thing. I'm not going political on you but ... And so, I go to my mother's. I show up. She's in the carport. Of course, they have a carport. The kind with the corrugated roof, you know. The Buick's parked outside, and she's jingling, jangling a pair of keys. "I got a surprise for you, baby!" "We taking your car?" "Not we, I." And she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a catastrophe. Somebody's storytelling. Interactive art. You can talk to me. Oh, a driver's license, a perfectly valid driver's license. Issued, evidently, by the DMV in her own county of Gwinnett. Blithering fucking idiots. (Laughter) I said, "Is that thing real?" "I think so." "Can you even see?" "I guess I must." "Oh, Jesus." She gets into the car — she's sitting on two phone books. I can't even make this part up because she's that tiny. She's engineered an umbrella so she can — bam! — slam the door. Her daughter, me, the village idiot with the ice cream cone in the middle of her forehead, is still standing there, slack-jawed. "You coming? You no coming?" "Oh, my God." I said, "OK, fine. Does pop know you're driving?" "Are you kidding me?" "How are you doing it?" "He's got to sleep sometime." And so we left my father fast asleep, because I knew he'd kill me if I let her go by herself, and we get in the car. Puts it in reverse. Fifty-five out of the driveway, in reverse. I am buckling in seatbelts from the front. I'm yanking them in from the back. I'm doing double knots. I mean, I've got a mouth as dry as the Kalahari Desert. I've got a white-knuckle grip on the door. You know what I'm talking about? And she's whistling, and finally I do the kind of birth breathing — you know, that one? Only a couple of women are going uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Right. And I said, "Ma, would you slow down?" Because now she's picked up the Highway 285, the perimeter around Atlanta, which encompasses now — there's seven lanes, she's on all of them, y'all. I said, "Ma, pick a lane!" "They give you seven lanes, they expect you to use them." And there she goes, right. I don't believe for a minute she has been out and not been stopped. So, I think, hey, we can talk. It'll be a diversion. It'll help my breathing. It'll do something for my pulse, maybe. "Mommy, I know you have been stopped." "No, no, what you talking about?" "You have a license. How long have you been driving?" "Four or five days." "Yeah. And you haven't been stopped?" "I did not get a ticket." I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but come on, come on, come on." "OK, so I stopped at a light and there's a guy, you know, in the back." "Would this guy have, like, a blue uniform and a terrified look on his face?" "You weren't there, don't start." "Come on. You got a ticket?" "No." She explained, "The man" — I have to tell you as she did, because it loses something if I don't, you know — "he come to the window, and he does a thing like this, which tells me he's pretty old, you know. So I look up and I'm thinking, maybe he's still going to think I'm kind of cute." "Ma, are you still doing that?" "If it works, it works, baby. So, I say, 'Perdon, yo no hablo ingles.' Well, wouldn't you know, he had been in Honduras for the Peace Corps." (Laughter) So he's talking to her, and at some point she says, "Then, you know, it was it. That was it. It was done." "Yeah? What? He gave you a ticket? He didn't give you a ticket? What?" "No, I look up, and the light, she change." (Laughter) You should be terrified. Now, I don't know if she's toying with me, kind of like a cat batting back a mouse, batting back a mouse — left paw, right paw, left paw, right paw — but by now, we've reached the mall. Now, you have all been at a mall during the holidays, yes? Talk to me. Yes. Yes. You can say yes. Audience: Yes. Carmen Agra Deedy: All right, then you know that you have now entered parking lot purgatory, praying to that saint of perpetual availability that as you join that serpentine line of cars crawling along, some guy's going to turn on the brake lights just as you pull up behind him. But that doesn't happen most of the time, right? So, first I say, "Ma, why are we here?" "You mean, like, in the car?" "No, don't — why are we here today? It's Saturday. It's the holidays." "Because I have to exchange your father's underwear." Now, see, this is the kind of Machiavellian thinking, that you really have to — you know, in my mind, it's a rabbit's warren, this woman's mind. Do I want to walk in, because unless I have Ariadne's thread to anchor — enough metaphors for you? — somewhere, I may not get out. But you know. (Laughter) "Why do we have to take pop's underwear back now? And why? What is wrong with his underwear?" "It will upset you." "It won't upset me. Why? What? Is something wrong with him?" "No, no, no. The only thing with him is, he's an idiot. I sent him to the store, which was my first mistake, and he went to buy underwear, and he bought the grippers, and he's supposed to buy the boxers." "Why?" "I read it on the Intersnet. You cannot have children." "Oh, my God!" (Laughter) Olivia? Huh? Huh? By now, we have now crawled another four feet, and my mother finally says to me, "I knew it, I knew it. I'm an immigrant. We make a space. What I tell you? Right there." And she points out the passenger window, and I look out, and three — three — aisles down, "Look, the Chevy." You want to laugh, but you don't know — you're that politically corrected, have you noticed? Correct the other direction now, it's OK. "Look, the Chevy — he's coming this way." "Mama, mama, mama, wait, wait, wait. The Chevy is three aisles away." She looks at me like I'm her, you know, her moron child, the cretin, the one she's got to speak to very slowly and distinctly. "I know that, honey. Get out of the car and go stand in the parking space till I get there." OK, I want a vote. Come on, come on. No, no. How many of you once in your — you were a kid, you were an adult — you stood in a parking space to hold it for someone? See, we're a secret club with a secret handshake. (Laughter) And years of therapy later, we're doing great. We're doing great. We're doing fine. Well, I stood up to her. This is — you know, you'd think by now I'm — and still holding? I said, "No way, ma, you have embarrassed me my entire life." Of course, her comeback is, "When have I embarrassed you?" (Spanish) And she's still talking while she puts the car in park, hits the emergency brake, opens the door, and with a spryness astounding in a woman her age, she jumps out of the car, knocks out the phone books, and then she walks around — she's carrying her cheap Kmart purse with her — around the front of the car. She has amazing land speed for a woman her age, too. Before I know it, she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars, and people behind me, with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us, wah-wah wah-wah. "I'm coming." Italian hand signals follow. I scoot over. I close the door. I leave the phone books. This is new and fast, just so you — are you still with us? We'll wait for the slow ones. OK. I start, and this is where a child says to me — and the story doesn't work if I tell you about her before, because this is my laconic child. A brevity, brevity of everything with this child. You know, she eats small portions. Language is something to be meted out in small phonemes, you know — just little hmm, hmm-hmm. She carries a mean spiral notebook and a pen. She wields great power. She listens, because that's what people who tell stories do first. But she pauses occasionally and says, "How do you spell that? What year? OK." When she writes the expose in about 20 years, don't believe a word of it. But this is my daughter, Lauren, my remarkable daughter, my borderline Asperger's kid. Bless you, Dr. Watson. She says, "Ma, you got to look!" Now, when this kid says I got to look, you know. But it isn't like I haven't seen this crime scene before. I grew up with this woman. I said, "Lauren, you know what, give me a play-by-play. I can't." "No, mama, you got to look." I got to look. You got to look. Don't you want to look? There she is. I look in bewildered awe: she's standing, those Rockports slightly apart, but grounded. She's holding out that cheap Kmart purse, and she is wielding it. She's holding back tons of steel with the sheer force of her little personality, in that crone-ish voice, saying things like, "Back it up, buddy! No, it's reserved!" (Laughter) Ready? Brace yourselves. Here it comes. "No, my daughter, she's coming in the Buick. Honey, sit up so they can see you." Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I finally come — and now, it's the South. I don't know what part of the country you live in. I think we all secretly love stories. We all secretly want our blankie and our Boo Bear. We want to curl up and say, "Tell it to me, tell it to me. Come on, honey, tell it to me." But in the South, we love a good story. People have pulled aside, I mean, they've come out of that queue line, they have popped their trunks, pulled out lawn chairs and cool drinks. Bets are placed. "I'm with the little lady. Damn!" (Laughter) And she's bringing me in with a slight salsa movement. She is, after all, Cuban. I'm thinking, "Accelerator, break. Accelerator, break." Like you've never thought that in your life? Right? Yeah. I pull in. I put the car in park. Engine's still running — mine, not the car. I jump out next to her going, "Don't you move!" "I'm not going anywhere." She's got front seat in a Greek tragedy. I come out, and there's Esther. She's hugging the purse. "Que?" Which means "what," and so much more. (Laughter) "Ma, have you no shame? People are watching us all around," right? Now, some of them you've got to make up, people. Secret of the trade. Guess what? Some of these stories I sculpt a little, here and there. Some, they're just right there, right there. Put them right there. She says this to me. After I say — let me refresh you — "have you no shame?" "No. I gave it up with pantyhose — they're both too binding." (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah, you can clap, but then you're about 30 seconds from the end. I'm about to snap like a brittle twig, when suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder. Intrepid soul. I'm thinking, "This is my kid. How dare she? She jumped out of that car." That's OK, because my mother yells at me, I yell at her. It's a beautiful hierarchy, and it works. (Laughter) I turn around, but it's not a child. It's a young woman, a little taller than I, pale green, amused eyes. With her is a young man — husband, brother, lover, it's not my job. And she says, "Pardon me, ma'am" — that's how we talk down there — "is that your mother?" I said, "No, I follow little old women around parking lots to see if they'll stop. Yes, it's my mother!" The boy, now, he says. "Well, what my sister meant" — they look at each other, it's a knowing glance — "God, she's crazy!" I said, (Spanish), and the young girl and the young boy say, "No, no, honey, we just want to know one more thing." I said, "Look, please, let me take care of her, OK, because I know her, and believe me, she's like a small atomic weapon, you know, you just want to handle her really gingerly." And the girl goes, "I know, but, I mean, I swear to God, she reminds us of our mother." I almost miss it. He turns to her on the heel of his shoe. It's a half-whisper, "God, I miss her." They turn then, shoulder to shoulder, and walk away, lost in their own reverie. Memories of some maddening woman who was the luck of their DNA draw. And I turn to Esther, who's rocking on those 'ports, and says, "You know what, honey?" "What, ma?" "I'm going to drive you crazy probably for about 14, 15 more years, if you're lucky, but after that, honey, you're going to miss me." (Applause)

The camel's hump

Keith Bellows

{0: 'Keith Bellows'}

{0: ['traveler']}

{0: 'On the heels of a long and bruising camel ride, Keith Bellows became fascinated with the "SUV of the sand," and with the many thorny aspects of their personalities (and mating habits) most of us would rather not dwell upon.'}

2002-02-02

2008-09-15

TED2002

en

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

['animals', 'energy', 'entertainment', 'global issues', 'sex', 'transportation']

{69: 'Dreams from endangered cultures', 324: 'How photography connects us', 273: 'The worldwide web of belief and ritual', 2455: 'You have no idea where camels really come from', 31814: 'What sticky sea creatures can teach us about making glue', 8787: 'Photos of Africa, taken from a flying lawn chair'}

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

Keith Bellows gleefully outlines the engineering marvels of the camel, a vital creature he calls "the SUV of the desert." Though he couldn't bring a live camel to TED, he gets his camera crew as close as humanly possible to a one-ton beast in full rut.

[SHIT] This is arguably the back end of the design of animals. (Laughter) But the reason I put this up here is because when I was in Africa last year, my wife and I were driving around, we had this wonderful guide, who showed us something that surprised both of us, and it was very revealing in terms of the fascination that comes with the design of animals. It turns out that in about the 1880s, the missionaries came to Africa to spread the word of Christianity, to teach English to the natives. And they brought blackboards and chalk. And I'd like you to imagine that that's a blackboard, and I just used some chalk on there. And they brought quite a bit of this stuff. But over the years, the blackboards were fine, but they ran out of chalk. And this is a real crisis for them. And that's where the hyena comes in. The hyena is probably the most perfectly designed scavenging animal in the world. It strip-mines carcasses, and it has amazing teeth, because it enables the hyena to essentially eat bones. Now, the end product of that action is up on the board here. What the missionaries would do is, they'd walk around and they'd pick up hyena shit. And the incredible thing about hyena shit is, it makes great chalk. (Laughter) That's not what I'm here to talk about, but it is a fascinating aspect of animal design. What I'm here to talk about is the camel. When I started talking to Richard about what I was going to speak about, I had recently come back from Jordan, where I had an amazing experience with a camel. (Laughter) And we were in the desert. Richard Wurman: That's the end! Keith Bellows: Yeah, yeah. We were in the desert, in Wadi Rum, in a small Jeep. There were four of us, two Bedouin drivers. You can just imagine, this expanse is an ocean of sand, 105 degrees, one water bottle. And we were driving in what they told us was their very, very best Jeep. Didn't look like it to me. And as we started to go through the desert, the Jeep broke down. The guys got out, they put the hood up, they started working under the hood, got it going again. About a hundred yards, it broke down. This went on about 6-7 times, we were getting more and more alarmed, we were also getting deeper and deeper into the desert. And eventually, our worst nightmare happened: they flooded the engine. And they said, "Ah, no problem! We just get out and walk." And we said, "We get out and walk?" One water bottle, remember, guys, four people. And they said, "Yeah, yeah, we'll walk. We'll find some camels." We got out and walked, and sure enough, about half a mile, we came over the crest of this hill, and there was a huge gathering of Bedouin with their camels. The guy went up and started dickering, and 10 dollars later, we had four camels. They went down like elevators; we got on them. They went back up, and the Bedouin, each Bedouin, four of them, got behind each of the camels with a little whip. And they started slashing away at the back of the camels, and they started galloping. And if you've ever been on a camel, it is a very, very uncomfortable ride. There's also one other aspect about these camels. About every 10 steps, they lean back and try to take a chunk out of your leg. (Laughter) So we kept on going, and this camel kept on trying to take a chunk out of my leg. And eventually, three miles later, we arrived at our destination, where a Jeep was supposed to meet us. And the camels come down again like elevators, we sort of clumsily get off, and they, obviously, try to take another chunk out of my leg. And I've developed a very wonderful relationship with this creature by this point, and I've realized that this is a mean son of a bitch. And much meaner, by the way, than the Bedouin who greeted me and tried to sell me one of his 26 daughters to take back to the States. So as we talked, Richard and I, I said, "You know, maybe I should bring a camel. It's the best designed animal in the world." He went, "Nah. I don't think we want to be bringing a camel." And you should be really glad we decided not to bring the camel. So I did the next best thing. I went to the Washington Zoo. Richard said, "I want you to get up close and personal with this camel. I want you to inspect its mouth, look at its teeth. Go underneath it. Go above it. Go around it. Pull its tail up; take a look in there. I want you to get as close to that camel as you possibly can." So, I got a National Geographic film crew. We went down there, and I took one look at this camel. It is a 2,000 pound creature who is in rut. (Laughter) Now, if you've ever seen a 2,000 pound camel in rut, it is a scary, scary thing to behold. And if Richard thought I was getting in the ring with that camel, someone was smoking Bedouin high grade. (Laughter) So we got as close to it as possible, and I'm going to share this. Chris, if you want to roll this film. Then I'm going to show you a little bit more about the design of camels. Do you want to roll the film? (Adventure music) (Video) Hello. This is Keith Bellows with the TED National Geographic Camel Investigation Unit. I'm here to look at the ultimate desert machine. (Music continues) Keith Bellows: And you'll note I started chewing gum because I was around this camel all day. (Video) That's it, OK. No! See, now he's getting a little overexcited. So we'll need to be very careful around him. Don't let him get you. Now, you can see copious amounts of saliva in there. I always called myself the unstable stable boy. Their nose, you can see his nose is flared right now. When they're in rut, they're similar to seals in the way, like, a seal has to open its nose to breathe. And they're similar. They have to consciously open their nose. KB: Ears? SK: They are small. But they have excellent hearing. But not big; for instance, in zebras, they have a huge ear that's very mobile, so they can actually turn them both around. And they use them in the same way we use our binocular vision. They use that to pinpoint sound. The desert's extremely windy as well as being very cold. So not only do they have the very long eyelashes, but there's the secondary — I guess you'd call it the [unclear] or whatever. It's this hair that's above the eyes, and below it, it's longer. Most people think that the humps store water. They don't. They store fat. Now, I'm not a chemist, but basically what happens is the fat is oxidized by their breathing. And that will turn it into actually usable water. Like a lot of predators, they walk on their toes. But there's a big fat pad in there that squishes out. They're like sun shoes, but, you know, with sand. Hooves? They don't have traditional hooves, but they do have one, like, big nail. (Audience laughter) You can't really see too clear. The fur's kind of grown over. But they use their tails a lot, especially in rut. He will urinate and spin his tail to spread the urine around and make him more attractive. I don't know why that would be, but it works for them. So, what the hell. (Audience laughter) Now, they will also defecate in certain areas. Generally, they poop wherever they want to, but during their rut, they will defecate in perimeter areas. I don't know if you've read or heard about the sub-sonic sounds from elephants, you know what I mean, like, "Br-r-r!" These big, big rumbling sounds. He will do the same thing. You can actually see, right here, it will vibrate. We weigh our animals. Unfortunately, he's a very aggressive animal, so he's actually destroyed some of the scales. We had these big things that I weigh the bison on, for instance. I'm guessing that he's at least 1,600 pounds. But I would put him closer to 2,000. He's basically a walking mulch pile. We're kind of like buds, but I'm also a male as well. KB: He sees you as competition? Senior Keeper: Yeah, exactly. And it makes him very dangerous at this time of year. Don't even think about it. Don't think about it! But now, we're going to meet. Out! Out! Out! No. Out! (Music) (Applause) KB: What I didn't show you was, you got that swinging thing going? Well, and you're glad I didn't show you this. One of the other things about the camel's beautiful design is that its penis points backwards. That way the camel can dip its tail in the stream, and just whacker the entire area around him. And that's how he really marks his territory. Now, what you also didn't see was that — and you may have noticed in the pen beside him and, by the way, the camel's name is Suki. In the pen beside him is Jasmine. Jasmine has been his mate for some time. But on this particular occasion, it was very, very clear that as horny as Suki was, Jasmine was having none of it. And so we started thinking. Well, if poor old Suki is in search of a mate, what would Suki do to find the perfect mate? I'm going to show you another film. But before I do, I just want to mention that this animal truly is a sort of the SUV of the sand, the ship of the desert. It's so vital to the inhabitants of the areas in which the camel is found, largely Mongolia and Sahara, that there are 160 words in Arabic to describe the camel. And if this is a creature that was designed by committee, it's certainly been like no committee I've ever been on. So here's what Suki would do in search of a mate. Can you roll it, please? Camel seeking camel Lusty beast desires attractive and sincere mate. I'm seven feet, 2,000 lbs., with brown hair and eyes, long legs — and I'm very well ... hung. I'm TED Camel. The perfect desert machine. I'm smartly designed. Eyelashes that keep out sand and a third eyelash that works like a windshield wiper. A distinguished nose — with nostrils lined to filter out sand and dust and a groove that catches moisture. Amazingly full lips — that allow me to eat practically anything that grows. Callouses on my knees that let me kneel comfortably. Leathery chest pads that beat the heat. Short fur that keeps my skin cool. Long legs that allow heat to escape. And my hump? Ogden Nash once wrote: "The camel has a single hump; the dromedary two, or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you?" Here's a hint: Bactarian. Dromedary. My hump contains up to 80 lbs. of fat, but doesn't store H2O. I'm built to last. I'm the go-to animal when the oasis is dry. I usually won't sweat until my body reaches 105 ºF, enough to fry an egg. I'm able to lose 40% of my weight without dying. (Most animals would if they lost half that much.) I'll drink 5 to 7 gallons of water a day. But go without for more than a month. I'm powerful. Able to pack up to 400 lbs. of cargo. Outrun a horse — And cover 26 miles on a good day. Camelot. Jackie O. once said that traveling by camel made riding an elephant seem like taking a jet plane. Yet my large, soft feet allow me to navigate sand. (Is that why the Bedouin claim I can dance?) I'm a good provider, too. Bedouins call the camel the Gift of God. No surprise. Tents and rugs are made of my hair. My dried bones are prized as a sort of ivory. My dung is burned as fuel. My milk is used for cheese. "Camels are like angels," a Bedouin once said. (Applause) Thank you. I just want to leave you with one last thought, which is probably the most important thing to take away. Humans, the animal, are pretty lucky creatures because, by and large, we really don't have to adapt to our environment; we adapt our environment to us. And we've seen that repeatedly through this conference, not just this year, but in past years. But this creature that you've just seen ultimately adapts, and keeps adapting and adapting. I think when you look at the animal kingdom, that is one of the most remarkable things. It doesn't have an environment that adapts to it; it has to adapt to the environment. Ricky, thank you very much for having me. RW: That's terrific. Thank you.

What's wrong with school lunches

Ann Cooper

{0: 'Ann Cooper'}

{0: ['lunch lady']}

{0: 'Ann Cooper cares -- a lot -- what kids eat for lunch. As the head of nutrition for Berkeley, California, schools, she serves organic, regionally sourced and sustainable meals to lots of lucky children.'}

2007-12-12

2008-09-16

EG 2007

en

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

['children', 'economics', 'education', 'food', 'global issues', 'green', 'Best of the Web']

{263: "What's wrong with what we eat", 214: "A plant's-eye view", 406: 'A foie gras parable', 2659: 'Want kids to learn well? Feed them well', 1530: 'A teacher growing green in the South Bronx', 765: 'Teach every child about food'}

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

Speaking at the 2007 EG conference, "renegade lunch lady" Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school -- local, sustainable, seasonal and even educational food.

My thing with school lunch is, it's a social justice issue. I'm the Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. I have 90 employees and 17 locations, 9,600 kids. I'm doing 7,100 meals a day and I've been doing it for two years, trying to change how we feed kids in America. And that's what I want to talk to you a little bit about today. These are some of my kids with a salad bar. I put salad bars in all of our schools when I got there. Everyone says it couldn't be done. Little kids couldn't eat off the salad bar, big kids would spit in it — neither happened. When I took over this, I tried to really figure out, like, what my vision would be. How do we really change children's relationship to food? And I'll tell you why we need to change it, but we absolutely have to change it. And what I came to understand is, we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet, healthy food and healthy kids. And that if we don't do that, the antithesis, although we've heard otherwise, is we're really going to become extinct, because we're feeding our children to death. That's my premise. We're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker. And the reason this is happening, by and large, is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food, the way the government oversees our food, the way the USDA puts food on kids' plates that's unhealthy, and allows unhealthy food into schools. And by — tacitly, all of us send our kids, or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, to school and tell them to learn, you know, learn what's in those schools. And when you feed these kids bad food, that's what they're learning. So that's really what this is all about. The way we got here is because of big agribusiness. We now live in a country where most of us don't decide, by and large, what we eat. We see big businesses, Monsanto and DuPont, who brought out Agent Orange and stain-resistant carpet. They control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country. These are — 10 companies control much of what's in our grocery stores, much of what people eat. And that's really, really a problem. So when I started thinking about these issues and how I was going to change what kids ate, I really started focusing on what we would teach them. And the very first thing was about regional food — trying to eat food from within our region. And clearly, with what's going on with fossil fuel usage, or when — as the fossil fuel is going away, as oil hits its peak oil, you know, we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should, or could, be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it. So we talked to kids about that, and we really start to feed kids regional food. And then we talk about organic food. Now, most school districts can't really afford organic food, but we, as a nation, have to start thinking about consuming, growing and feeding our children food that's not chock-full of chemicals. We can't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones. We can't keep doing that. You know, it doesn't work. And the results of that are kids getting sick. One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics. Seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumed in animal husbandry. We are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day. Seventy percent — it's unbelievable. And the result of it is, we have diseases. We have things like E. coli that we can't fix, that we can't make kids better when they get sick. And, you know, certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed, but it's an issue in the food supply. One of my favorite facts is that U.S. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. That means every one of us, and our children, consumes what would equal a five-pound bag — those bags you have at home. If I had one here and ripped it open, and that pile I would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply, because of the way we consume produce in America. The USDA allows these antibiotics, these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply, and the USDA paid for this ad in Time magazine. Okay, we could talk about Rachel Carson and DDT, but we know it wasn't good for you and me. And that is what the USDA allows in our food supply. And that has to change, you know. The USDA cannot be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what's allowed. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart. The antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food. That's what I really try and get people to understand. I really try and teach it to kids. I think it's the most important. It's consuming food in a way in which we'll still have a planet, in which kids will grow up to be healthy, and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we're seeing. It really is just a new idea. I mean, people toss around sustainability, but we have to figure out what sustainability is. In less than 200 years, you know, just in a few generations, we've gone from being 200 — being 100 percent, 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers. We now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers — 2.1 million prisoners, 1.9 million farmers. And we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison, and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child. It's no wonder, you know, we have criminals. (Laughter) And what's happening is, we're getting sick. We're getting sick and our kids are getting sick. It is about what we feed them. What goes in is what we are. We really are what we eat. And if we continue down this path, if we continue to feed kids bad food, if we continue not to teach them what good food is, what's going to happen? You know, what is going to happen? What's going to happen to our whole medical system? What's going to happen is, we're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control, has said, of the children born in the year 2000 — those seven- and eight-year-olds today — one out of every three Caucasians, one out of every two African-Americans and Hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime. And if that's not enough, they've gone on to say, most before they graduate high school. This means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade. Within a decade. What's going to happen? Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents. And it's because of what we feed them. Because eight-year-olds don't get to decide — and if they do, you should be in therapy. You know, we are responsible for what kids eat. But oops, maybe they're responsible for what kids eat. Big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids. 20 billion dollars a year. 10,000 ads most kids see. They spend 500 dollars for every one dollar — 500 dollars marketing foods that kids shouldn't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy, nutritious food. The result of which is kids think they're going to die if they don't have chicken nuggets. You know that everybody thinks they should be eating more, and more, and more. This is the USDA portion size, that little, tiny thing. And the one over there, that's bigger than my head, is what McDonald's and Burger King and those big companies think we should eat. And why can they serve that much? Why can we have 29-cent Big Gulps and 99-cent double burgers? It's because of the way the government commodifies food, and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really, really cheap. Which is why I say it's a social justice issue. Now, I said I'm doing this in Berkeley, and you might think, "Oh, Berkeley. Of course you can do it in Berkeley." Well, this is the food I found 24 months ago. This is not even food. This is the stuff we were feeding our kids: Extremo Burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything came in plastic, in cardboard. The only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter. The only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher, because if it didn't come in a can, it came frozen in a box. The USDA allows this. The USDA allows all of this stuff. In case you can't tell, that's, like, pink Danish and some kind of cupcakes. Chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, chocolate milk with high fructose, canned fruit cocktail — a reimbursable meal. That's what the government says is okay to feed our kids. It ain't okay. You know what? It is not okay. And we, all of us, have to understand that this is about us, that we can make a difference here. Now I don't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets, but I'm sure you're rich if you did. But whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart, a giraffe, a star? Well, Tyson did, because there's no chicken in the chicken. And that they could figure it out, that we could sell this stuff to kids. You know, what's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken? But this is what most schools serve. In fact, this may be what a lot of parents serve, as opposed to — this is what we try and serve. We really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food. We really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe. You know, that vegetables are actually colorful, that they have flavor, that carrots grow in the ground, that strawberries grow in the ground. There's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush. You know, we have to change the way we teach kids about these things. There's a lot of stuff we can do. There's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs. There's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools. Now, in Berkeley, we've gone totally fresh. We have no high-fructose corn syrup, no trans fats, no processed foods. We're cooking from scratch every day. We have 25 percent of our — (Applause) thank you — 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local. We cook. Those are my hands. I get up at 4 a.m. every day and go cook the food for the kids, because this is what we need to do. We can't keep serving kids processed crap, full of chemicals, and expect these are going to be healthy citizens. You're not going to get the next generation, or the generation after, to be able to think like this if they're not nourished. If they're eating chemicals all the time, they're not going to be able to think. They're not going to be smart. You know what? They're just going to be sick. Now one of the things that — what happened when I went into Berkeley is I realized that, you know, this was all pretty amazing to people, very, very different, and I needed to market it. I came up with these calendars that I sent home to every parent. And these calendars really started to lay out my program. Now I'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district. So this is a typical menu. This is what we're serving this week at the schools. And you see these recipes on the side? Those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes. They do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes. They also may be growing them. And we serve them in the cafeterias. If we're going to change children's relationship to food, it's delicious, nutritious food in the cafeterias, hands-on experience — you're looking in cooking and gardening classes — and academic curriculum to tie it all together. Now you've probably garnered that I don't love the USDA, and I don't have any idea what to do with their pyramid, this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top, I don't know. You know, run up into the end of the rainbow, I don't know what you do with it. So, I came up with my own. This is available on my website in English and Spanish, and it's a visual way to talk to kids about food. The really tiny hamburger, the really big vegetables. We have to start changing this. We have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference. We have cooking classes — we have cooking classrooms in our schools. And why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation, maybe two, of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food, one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a TV or computer. What are kids learning? Where is the family time? Where is socialization? Where is discussion? Where is learning to talk? You know, we have to change it. I work with kids a lot. These are kids I work with in Harlem. EATWISE — Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating. We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts aren't breakfast. We have to teach kids that if they're on a diet of refined sugar, they go up and down, just like if they're on a diet of crack. And we have to pull it all together. We have composting in all of our schools. We have recycling in all of our schools. You know, the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important, we have to teach kids about in school. It has to be so much a part of them that they really get it. Because, you know what, many of us are sort of at the end of our careers, and we need to be giving these kids — these young kids, the next generation — the tools to save themselves and save the planet. One of the things I do a lot is public-private partnerships. I work with private companies who are willing to do R & D with me, who are willing to do distribution for me, who are really willing to work to go into schools. Schools are underfunded. Most schools in America spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child. That comes down to under five dollars an hour. Most of you spend 10, 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them. So we're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system. And if we're going to change it, and change how we feed kids, we really have to rethink that. So, public and private partnerships, advocacy groups, working with foundations. In our school district, the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services. And I think if every school district allocated a half to one percent, we could start to really fix this program. We really need to change it. It's going to take more money. Of course, it's not all about food; it's also about kids getting exercise. And one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch. It's sort of this "duh" thing. You know, if you have kids coming into lunch and all they're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess, you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside. And then, at one in the afternoon, they're totally crashing. These are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up, because they haven't had lunch. So if the only thing they'd have to do after lunch is go to class, believe me, they're going to sit there and eat their lunch. We need to — we need to educate. We need to educate the kids. We need to educate the staff. I had 90 employees. Two were supposed to be cooks — none could. And, you know, I'm not that better off now. But we really have to educate. We have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again, because, of course, they don't — because we've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long. We need 40-minute lunches — most schools have 20-minute lunches — and lunches that are time-appropriate. There was just a big study done, and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning. That is not lunchtime. You know, it's crazy. It's crazy what we're doing. And just remember, at very least tacitly, this is what we're teaching children as what they should be doing. I think if we're going to fix this, one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the National School Lunch Program. Instead of the National School Lunch Program being under the USDA, I think it should be under CDC. If we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative, and we started thinking about food as health, then I think we wouldn't have corn dogs as lunch. Okay, Finance 101 on this, and this — I'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece, because I think this is something we all have to understand. The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year. That number probably needs to double. People say, "Oh my God, where are we going to get 8 billion?" In this country, we're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food. We spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids. We spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables, which is why we need all the diet aids. We spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today, with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes. 200 billion. So you know what, when we talk about needing 8 billion more, it's not a lot. That 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents — that's what the government allocates for lunch. Most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead. That means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools — most schools, 80 to 90 cents. In L.A., it's 56 cents. So we're spending less than a dollar, OK, on lunch. Now I don't know about you, but I go to Starbucks and Pete's and places like that, and venti latte in San Francisco is five dollars. One gourmet coffee, one, is more — we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools. You know what? We should be ashamed. We, as a country, should be ashamed at that. The richest country. In our country, it's the kids that need it the most, who get this really, really lousy food. It's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that can't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food. And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick. Those are the same kids who we should be taking care of. We can all make a difference. That every single one of us, whether we have children, whether we care about children, whether we have nieces or nephews, or anything — that we can make a difference. Whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids, whether you take your kids, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers' market. Just do tastings with them. Sit down and care. And on the macro level, we're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign, and of all the things we're asking all of these potential leaders, what about asking for the health of our children? Thank you.

The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt

{0: 'Jonathan Haidt'}

{0: ['social psychologist']}

{0: 'Jonathan Haidt studies how -- and why -- we evolved to be moral and political creatures.'}

2008-03-01

2008-09-17

TED2008

en

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

['brain', 'culture', 'evolution', 'global issues', 'morality', 'politics', 'psychology', 'evolutionary psychology']

{68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 163: 'The surprising decline in violence', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 2669: 'How to have better political conversations', 2625: 'Can a divided America heal?', 2716: 'Political common ground in a polarized United States'}

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

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. They go to see Michelangelo's "David," and when they finally come face-to-face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. The first guy — we'll call him Adam — is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. The second guy — we'll call him Bill — is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. So here's my question for you: Which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore? I don't need a show of hands, because we all have the same political stereotypes. We all know that it's Bill. And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable. If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior, like why artists are so different from accountants. You can predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to and what kinds of food they like to eat. Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know. (Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics. The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae, says that "Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views ..." They like a society which is open and changing, "... whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views." This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. Here's the description of a group I found on the web. What kinds of people would join "a global community ... welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all"? This is from some guy named Ted. Well, let's see now. If openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? Let's find out. I'll ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center — on social issues, primarily — or conservative. And I'll give a third option, because I know there are libertarians in the audience. So please raise your hand — in the simulcast rooms too. Let's let everybody see who's here. Please raise your hand if you'd say that you're liberal or left of center. Please raise your hand high right now. OK. Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian. OK. About two dozen. And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative. One, two, three, four, five — about eight or 10. OK. This is a bit of a problem. Because if our goal is to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team. And once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. When the liberal team loses, [United States of Canada / Jesusland] as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. (Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. We think they must be blinded by religion [Post-election US map: America / Dumbf*ckistan] or by simple stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) So if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral Matrix, in a particular moral Matrix. And by "the Matrix," I mean literally the Matrix, like the movie "The Matrix." But I'm here today to give you a choice. You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral Matrix. Now, because I know — (Applause) I assume that answers my question. I was going to ask which one you picked, but no need. You're all high in openness to experience, and it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures. Anyway, let's go with the red pill, study some moral psychology and see where it takes us. Let's start at the beginning: What is morality, where does it come from? The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I've seen, which clarifies so many things for me, is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. 'Built-in' doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches: What sorts of things do people talk about across disciplines that you find across cultures and even species? We found five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality. The first one is harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called "The Golden Rule" — as we heard from Karen Armstrong, it's the foundation of many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. The third foundation is in-group/loyalty. You do find cooperative groups in the animal kingdom, but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate and join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient drives. The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference and even elements of love, at times. The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body and what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays. A lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch or put into your body. I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with, a preparedness to learn all these things. But as my son Max grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us, in Lynchburg, Virginia? To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor. If there really are five systems at work in the mind, five sources of intuitions and emotions, then we can think of the moral mind as one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. My colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham and I made a questionnaire, which we put up on the web at www.YourMorals.org. And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can, too. Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. On the left are the scores for liberals; on the right, conservatives; in the middle, moderates. The blue line shows people's responses on the average of all the harm questions. So as you see, people care about harm and care issues. They highly endorse these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives; the line slopes down. Same story for fairness. But look at the other three lines. For liberals, the scores are very low. They're basically saying, "This is not morality. In-group, authority, purity — this has nothing to do with morality. I reject it." But as people get more conservative, the values rise. We can say liberals have a two-channel or two-foundation morality. Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality. We find this in every country we look at. Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians. I'll flip through a few other slides. The UK, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity, which shows that, within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. I mean, we debate over what's fair, but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity. This effect is so robust, we find it no matter how we ask the question. In a recent study, we asked people, suppose you're about to get a dog, you picked a particular breed, learned about the breed. Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal. If you're a liberal, you say, "That's great!" because liberals like to say, "Fetch! Please." (Laughter) But if you're a conservative, that's not so attractive. If you're conservative and learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn't warm up to strangers, for conservatives, loyalty is good; dogs ought to be loyal. But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. (Laughter) You might say, OK, there are differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes the three other foundations moral? Aren't they the foundations of xenophobia, authoritarianism and puritanism? What makes them moral? The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, are where they're supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. (Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell. So this triptych, these three panels, portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in "Nature" a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter had people play a commons dilemma, a game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, then the experimenter doubles what's there, and then it's all divided among the players. So it's a nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they don't really benefit from their own sacrifice. You really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to free ride. What happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative. This is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see other people aren't doing so much. "I don't want to be a sucker. I won't cooperate." So cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good down to close to zero. But then — and here's the trick — Fehr and Gächter, on the seventh round, told people, "You know what? New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that." And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. It shoots up and it keeps going up. Lots of research shows that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It's not enough to appeal to people's good motives. It helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior. Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other and being more effective at competing with other groups. That's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. But I'm particularly interested in religion and the origin of religion and in what it does to us and for us, because I think the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is really simple — a lot of rock and a lot of water and wind and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It's not that complicated. This is what's complicated: that people lived in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa or the frozen shores of Alaska. And some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon and Rome and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen? It's an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you need to be concerned about harm, you need a psychology of justice. But it helps to organize a group if you have subgroups, and if those subgroups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality — to pursue higher, nobler ends. Now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives: liberals reject three of these foundations. They say, "Let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership," and, "Let's question authority," and, "Keep your laws off my body." Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority and morality can be quite repressive and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people who don't fit in. Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This shirt says, "Stop bitching, start a revolution." If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good; it's change, it's fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost, to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's precious, and it's really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, "The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights." This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. Once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability, then I think the way is open to step outside the moral Matrix. This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about yin and yang. Yin and yang aren't enemies; they don't hate each other. Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. You find the same thing in Hinduism. There are many high gods in Hinduism. Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This image, actually, is both of those gods sharing the same body. You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. You have the markings of Shiva on the right — Shiva's the liberal god. And they work together. You find the same thing in Buddhism. These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. From the Zen master Sēngcàn: "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be 'for' or 'against.' The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease." Unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders. But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself: Do you accept this? Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? Can you be not for or against anything? So what's the point? What should you do? Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions and combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? Am I telling you to embrace Sēngcàn and stop, stop with the struggle of for and against? No, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight wrongs, to solve problems. But as we learned from Samantha Power in her story about Sérgio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, "You're wrong, and I'm right," because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are — understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right — and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out — check in with Sēngcàn. Step out of the moral Matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody thinks they're right, and even if you disagree with them, everybody has some reasons for what they're doing. Step out. And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. Think about the Dalai Lama. Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama. It comes from his moral humility. So I think the point — the point of my talk and, I think, the point of TED — is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. And so I think the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. Thank you. (Applause)

What security means to me

Eve Ensler

{0: 'Eve Ensler'}

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

{0: 'Eve Ensler created the groundbreaking "Vagina Monologues," whose success propelled her to found V-Day -- a movement to end violence against women and girls everywhere.'}

2005-07-07

2008-09-18

TEDGlobal 2005

en

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

['activism', 'culture', 'global issues', 'spoken word', 'technology', 'violence', 'war', 'women']

{64: 'Happiness in body and soul', 22704: 'Did the global response to 9/11 make us safer?', 1513: "A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global security", 1078: 'On being a woman and a diplomat', 1076: 'Inspiring a life of immersion', 1136: 'The mothers who found forgiveness, friendship'}

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

Playwright Eve Ensler explores our modern craving for security -- and why it makes us less secure. Listen for inspiring, heartbreaking stories of women making change.

I think it'll be a relief to some people and a disappointment to others that I'm not going to talk about vaginas today. I began "The Vagina Monologues" because I was worried about vaginas. I'm very worried today about this notion, this world, this prevailing kind of force of security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Real security, security checks, security watch, security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? What does anyone mean when they talk about real security? And why have we, as Americans particularly, become a nation that strives for security above all else? In fact, I think that security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure. And that's actually the good news. This is, of course, unless your whole life is about being secure. I think that when that is the focus of your life, these are the things that happen. You can't travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. You can't allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time, as they might confuse you or challenge you. You can't open yourself to new experiences, new people, new ways of doing things — they might take you off course. You can't not know who you are, so you cling to hard-matter identity. You become a Christian, Muslim, Jew. You're an Indian, Egyptian, Italian, American. You're a heterosexual or a homosexual, or you never have sex. Or at least, that's what you say when you identify yourself. You become part of an "us." In order to be secure, you defend against "them." You cling to your land because it is your secure place. You must fight anyone who encroaches upon it. You become your nation. You become your religion. You become whatever it is that will freeze you, numb you and protect you from doubt or change. But all this does, actually, is shut down your mind. In reality, it does not really make you safer. I was in Sri Lanka, for example, three days after the tsunami, and I was standing on the beaches and it was absolutely clear that, in a matter of five minutes, a 30-foot wave could rise up and desecrate a people, a population and lives. All this striving for security, in fact, has made you much more insecure because now you have to watch out all the time. There are people not like you — people who you now call enemies. You have places you cannot go, thoughts you cannot think, worlds that you can no longer inhabit. And so you spend your days fighting things off, defending your territory and becoming more entrenched in your fundamental thinking. Your days become devoted to protecting yourself. This becomes your mission. That is all you do. Ideas get shorter. They become sound bytes. There are evildoers and saints, criminals and victims. There are those who, if they're not with us, are against us. It gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what's inside them. It gets easier to lock them up, force them to be naked, humiliate them, occupy them, invade them and kill them, because they are only obstacles now to your security. In six years, I've had the extraordinary privilege through V-Day, a global movement against [violence against] women, to travel probably to 60 countries, and spend a great deal of time in different portions. I've met women and men all over this planet, who through various circumstances — war, poverty, racism, multiple forms of violence — have never known security, or have had their illusion of security forever devastated. I've spent time with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who were essentially brutalized and censored. I've been in Bosnian refugee camps. I was with women in Pakistan who have had their faces melted off with acid. I've been with girls all across America who were date-raped, or raped by their best friends when they were drugged one night. One of the amazing things that I've discovered in my travels is that there is this emerging species. I loved when he was talking about this other world that's right next to this world. I've discovered these people, who, in V-Day world, we call Vagina Warriors. These particular people, rather than getting AK-47s, or weapons of mass destruction, or machetes, in the spirit of the warrior, have gone into the center, the heart of pain, of loss. They have grieved it, they have died into it, and allowed and encouraged poison to turn into medicine. They have used the fuel of their pain to begin to redirect that energy towards another mission and another trajectory. These warriors now devote themselves and their lives to making sure what happened to them doesn't happen to anyone else. There are thousands if not millions of them on the planet. I venture there are many in this room. They have a fierceness and a freedom that I believe is the bedrock of a new paradigm. They have broken out of the existing frame of victim and perpetrator. Their own personal security is not their end goal, and because of that, because, rather than worrying about security, because the transformation of suffering is their end goal, I actually believe they are creating real safety and a whole new idea of security. I want to talk about a few of these people that I've met. Tomorrow, I am going to Cairo, and I'm so moved that I will be with women in Cairo who are V-Day women, who are opening the first safe house for battered women in the Middle East. That will happen because women in Cairo made a decision to stand up and put themselves on the line, and talk about the degree of violence that is happening in Egypt, and were willing to be attacked and criticized. And through their work over the last years, this is not only happening that this house is opening, but it's being supported by many factions of the society who never would have supported it. Women in Uganda this year, who put on "The Vagina Monologues" during V-Day, actually evoked the wrath of the government. And, I love this story so much. There was a cabinet meeting and a meeting of the presidents to talk about whether "Vaginas" could come to Uganda. And in this meeting — it went on for weeks in the press, two weeks where there was huge discussion. The government finally made a decision that "The Vagina Monologues" could not be performed in Uganda. But the amazing news was that because they had stood up, these women, and because they had been willing to risk their security, it began a discussion that not only happened in Uganda, but all of Africa. As a result, this production, which had already sold out, every single person in that 800-seat audience, except for 10 people, made a decision to keep the money. They raised 10,000 dollars on a production that never occurred. There's a young woman named Carrie Rethlefsen in Minnesota. She's a high school student. She had seen "The Vagina Monologues" and she was really moved. And as a result, she wore an "I heart my vagina" button to her high school in Minnesota. (Laughter) She was basically threatened to be expelled from school. They told her she couldn't love her vagina in high school, that it was not a legal thing, that it was not a moral thing, that it was not a good thing. So she really struggled with this, what to do, because she was a senior and she was doing well in her school and she was threatened expulsion. So what she did is she got all her friends together — I believe it was 100, 150 students all wore "I love my vagina" T-shirts, and the boys wore "I love her vagina" T-shirts to school. (Laughter) Now this seems like a fairly, you know, frivolous, but what happened as a result of that, is that that school now is forming a sex education class. It's beginning to talk about sex, it's beginning to look at why it would be wrong for a young high school girl to talk about her vagina publicly or to say that she loved her vagina publicly. I know I've talked about Agnes here before, but I want to give you an update on Agnes. I met Agnes three years ago in the Rift Valley. When she was a young girl, she had been mutilated against her will. That mutilation of her clitoris had actually obviously impacted her life and changed it in a way that was devastating. She made a decision not to go and get a razor or a glass shard, but to devote her life to stopping that happening to other girls. For eight years, she walked through the Rift Valley. She had this amazing box that she carried and it had a torso of a woman's body in it, a half a torso, and she would teach people, everywhere she went, what a healthy vagina looked like and what a mutilated vagina looked like. In the years that she walked, she educated parents, mothers, fathers. She saved 1,500 girls from being cut. When V-Day met her, we asked her how we could support her and she said, "Well, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster." So, we bought her a Jeep. In the year she had the Jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So, we said, what else could we do? She said, "If you help me get money, I could open a house." Three years ago, Agnes opened a safe house in Africa to stop mutilation. When she began her mission eight years ago, she was reviled, she was detested, she was completely slandered in her community. I am proud to tell you that six months ago, she was elected the deputy mayor of Narok. (Applause) I think what I'm trying to say here is that if your end goal is security, and if that's all you're focusing on, what ends up happening is that you create not only more insecurity in other people, but you make yourself far more insecure. Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist. Not running from loss, but entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. Real security is not knowing something, when you don't know it. Real security is hungering for connection rather than power. It cannot be bought or arranged or made with bombs. It is deeper, it is a process, it is acute awareness that we are all utterly inter-bended, and one action by one being in one tiny town has consequences everywhere. Real security is not only being able to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity, but hungering for them and only trusting a situation when they are present. Something happened when I began traveling in V-Day, eight years ago. I got lost. I remember being on a plane going from Kenya to South Africa, and I had no idea where I was. I didn't know where I was going, where I'd come from, and I panicked. I had a total anxiety attack. And then I suddenly realized that it absolutely didn't matter where I was going, or where I had come from because we are all essentially permanently displaced people. All of us are refugees. We come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time, moving towards a new place. Freedom means I may not be identified as any one group, but that I can visit and find myself in every group. It does not mean that I don't have values or beliefs, but it does mean I am not hardened around them. I do not use them as weapons. In the shared future, it will be just that, shared. The end goal will [be] becoming vulnerable, realizing the place of our connection to one another, rather than becoming secure, in control and alone. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: And how are you doing? Are you exhausted? On a typical day, do you wake up with hope or gloom? Eve Ensler: You know, I think Carl Jung once said that in order to survive the twentieth century, we have to live with two existing thoughts, opposite thoughts, at the same time. And I think part of what I'm learning in this process is that one must allow oneself to feel grief. And I think as long as I keep grieving, and weeping, and then moving on, I'm fine. When I start to pretend that what I'm seeing isn't impacting me, and isn't changing my heart, then I get in trouble. Because when you spend a lot of time going from place to place, country to country, and city to city, the degree to which women, for example, are violated, and the epidemic of it, and the kind of ordinariness of it, is so devastating to one's soul that you have to take the time, or I have to take the time now, to process that. CA: There are a lot of causes out there in the world that have been talked about, you know, poverty, sickness and so on. You spent eight years on this one. Why this one? EE: I think that if you think about women, women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them, they are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If you think that the U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime, we're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet, we're talking about the place where we come from, we're talking about parenting. Imagine that you've been raped and you're bringing up a boy child. How does it impact your ability to work, or envision a future, or thrive, as opposed to just survive? What I believe is if we could figure out how to make women safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.

How to pitch to a VC

David S. Rose

{0: 'David S. Rose'}

{0: ['angel investor']}

{0: '"The Pitch Coach" David S. Rose is an expert on the business pitch. As an entrepreneur, he has raised millions for his own companies. As an investor, he has funded millions more.'}

2007-03-01

2008-09-19

TED2007

en

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

['business', 'invention', 'investment', 'presentation', 'technology']

{70: '8 secrets of success', 28: 'How to get your ideas to spread', 72: "Technology's long tail", 2182: 'How to run a company with (almost) no rules', 27622: 'Confessions of a recovering micromanager', 848: 'How great leaders inspire action'}

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

Thinking startup? David S. Rose's rapid-fire TED U talk on pitching to a venture capitalist tells you the 10 things you need to know about yourself -- and prove to a VC -- before you fire up your slideshow.

Good morning. My name is David Rose. I am a serial entrepreneur turned serial investor. And by the use of pitching PowerPoints to VCs, I have personally raised tens of millions of dollars from VCs through PowerPoint pitches. And turning to the other side of the equation, I've personally supervised the investment of tens of millions of dollars into companies who have pitched me with PowerPoint presentations. So I think it's safe to say I know a little bit about the process of pitching. So, the very first question you've got to figure out is: What is the single most important thing that a VC is looking for when you come to them pitching your new business idea? There are obviously all kinds of things — business models and financials and markets and this and that. Overall, of all the things that you have to do, what is the single most important thing the VC is going to be investing in? Somebody? What? Audience: People! David Rose: People! You! That's it — you are the person. Therefore, the entire purpose of a VC pitch is to convince them that you are the entrepreneur in whom they are going to invest their money and make a lot of money in return. Now, how do you do this? You can't just walk up and say, "Hi, I'm a really good guy, good girl, and you should invest in me." Right? So in the course of your VC pitch — you have a very few minutes; most VC pitches, angel pitches, are about 15 minutes, most should be less than half an hour — people's attention span, after 18 minutes, begins to drop off. Tests have shown. So in that 18 or 10 or five minutes, you have to convey a whole bunch of different characteristics, about 10 different characteristics, while you're standing up there. What's the single most important thing you've got to convey? What? Audience: Integrity. DR: Boy, oh boy, oh boy! That's a straight line, look at that! And I didn't even prompt him. Right, integrity. The key thing. I would much rather invest in, take a chance on, somebody who I know is straight than where there's any possible question of who are they looking out for, and what's going on. So the most important thing is integrity. What's the second most important thing? Let's see if you can get this one. Audience: Self-confidence. DR: Close enough. Passion. Right? Entrepreneurs, by definition, are people who are leaving something else, starting a new world, creating and putting their lifeblood into this thing. You've got to convey passion. If you're not passionate, why should anyone else be, or put money into your company if you're not passionate about it? Integrity, passion: the most important things. Then there's a whole panoply of other things you've got to wrap up in this package you're presenting to a VC. Experience: you've got to be able to say, "Hey, you know, I've done this before." "Done this before" is starting an enterprise, creating value, and taking something from beginning to end. That's why VCs love to fund serial entrepreneurs — even if you didn't do it right the first time, you've learned the lessons, which puts you in good stead the next time. Along with the experience of starting an enterprise or running something — doesn't have to be a business, it can be an organization in a school, a not-for-profit. But experience in creating an organization. Next: knowledge. If you tell me you're going to be the developer of the map of the human genome, you better know what a human genome is; I want you to have expertise. I don't want somebody who says, "I've got a great idea in a business I know nothing about. I don't know who the players are, what the market is like." You've got to know your market, your area. And you have to have the skills that it takes to get a company going. Those skills include everything from technical skills if it's a technology business, to marketing and sales and management and so on. But, you know, not everybody has all these skills. Very few people have the full set of skills it takes to run a company. What else do you require? Well, leadership. You've got to be able to convince us that you either have developed a team that has all those factors in it, or else you can. And you have the charisma and the management style and the ability to get people to follow your lead, to inspire them, to motivate them to be part of your team. Having done all that, what else do I want to know as a VC? I want to know that you have commitment. That you are going to be here to the end. I want you to say — or I want you to convey — that you are going to die if you have to, with your very last breath, your fingernails scratching as they draw you out. You'll keep my money alive and make more from it. I don't want someone who'll cut and run at the first opportunity. Bad things happen. There's never been a venture-funded company where bad things didn't happen. So know that you're committed to the very end. You've got to have vision to see where this is going. I don't want another "me too" product. I want somebody who can change the world out there. But on top of that, I need realism, Because while changing the world is great, it doesn't always happen. And before you get to change the world, bad things are going to take place; you have to deal with that. And you have to have rational projections. Finally, you're asking for my money — not just because it's my money, but because it's me. You need to be coachable. I need to know you have the ability to listen. We've had a lot of experience. People who are VCs or angels investing in you have had experience, and they'd like to know that you want to hear that experience. So how do you convey these 10 things in 10 minutes without saying them? You can't say, "I've got integrity, invest in me!" You've got to do a whole pitch that conveys this without conveying it. Think about your pitch as a timeline. It starts off, you walk in the door. They know nothing whatsoever about you. You can take them on an emotional — all pitches, all sales presentations, are emotional at some level. You can go up, you can go down, right? And it goes from beginning to end. You walk in, the first thing you've got to do, the overall arc of your presentation, it's got to start like a rocket. You've got maybe 10 seconds — between 10 and 30 seconds, depending on how long the pitch is — to get their attention. In my case, I've invested. I've gotten millions of dollars from PowerPoint pitches. "I've invested millions." That should get you right there. This can be a fact or something counterintuitive. It can be a story or an experience. But you've got to grab their emotional attention, focused on you, within that first few seconds. And then from there, you've got to take them on a very solid, steady, upward path, right from beginning to end. Everything has to reinforce this. And you've got to get better and better and better, revving up to the very end, then you've got to — boom! — knock them out of the park. You want to get them to such an emotional high they're ready to write you a check, throw money at you, before you leave. How do you do that? First of all, logical progression. Any time you go backwards, any time you skip a step — imagine walking up a staircase where some of the treads are missing, or the heights are different. You stop, you need to figure out a nice, logical progression. Start with what the market is: Why are you going to do X, Y or Z? And then you've got to tell me how you're going to do it, and what you're going to do. And it's got to flow from beginning to end. You've got to let me know there are touchstones, to tie in to the rest of the world out there. For example, reference companies I've heard of, or basic items in your business. I want to know about things that I can relate to: validators, or anything that tells me somebody else has approved this, or there's outside validation. It can be sales; it can be you got an award for something; it can be people have done it before; it can be your beta tests are going great, whatever. I want to know validation — not just what you're telling me, but that somebody or something else out there says this makes sense. And then, I'm looking for the upside; I need a believable upside. That's two parts; it's got to be upside and believable. The upside means if you tell me that five years out, you're making a million dollars a year, that's not really upside. Telling me you'll be making a billion dollars a year — that's not believable. So it's got to be both. On the other hand are things that take the emotional level down. You have to recover from those. For example, anything that I know is not true. "We have no competition. Nobody makes a widget like this." Odds are I know somebody who's made a widget, and the minute you tell me that, I discount half of what you're saying from then on. Anything I don't understand, where I have to make the leap myself, in my own head, will stop the flow of the presentation. So you've got to take me through like a sixth-grader — dub, dub, dub — but without patronizing me. And it's a very tricky path. But if you can do it, it works really well. Anything that's inconsistent within your concept — if you tell me sales of X, Y or Z are 10 million dollars, five slides later, they're five million dollars ... One may have been gross sales, one may have been net sales, but I want to know that all the numbers make sense together. And then, finally: anything that's an error or a typo, or a stupid mistake or a line that's in the wrong place — that shows me that if you can't do a presentation, how can you run a company? So this all feeds in together. The best way to do this is to look at our betters, people who have done this before. Let's look at the most successful technology executive in the business, and see how a presentation goes. Bill Gates's PowerPoint presentation over here. Here's Gates doing a thing for Windows. Is this how to do a PowerPoint presentation? What do you think? No. Who do you think we should look at as our role model? Oh, isn't that funny! There's another great one over here. OK, Steve Jobs. You want absolute — this is the Zen of presentation, right? Here he is, one little guy, black jeans and stuff, on a totally empty stage. What are you focusing on? You're focusing on him! This is Steve Jobs. So are these wonderful long bullet points, whole list of things good? No, they're not. The long bullet points are bad. What's good? Short. Short bullet points. But you know what? Even better than short bullet points are no bullet points. Just give me the headline. And you know what? How many bullet points does Steve Jobs use? Basically, none. What do you do? Best of all, images. Just a simple image. I look at the image; a picture's worth a thousand words. You look at the image and you've got the whole thing. Then you come back to me; you're focused on me, why I'm such a great guy, why you want to invest, why this all makes sense. That said, we only have a very short time, so let's run through the things to include in your presentation. First of all, none of these big, long-titled slides with blah, blah, I'm presenting to so-and-so on X date. I know the day, I know who I am — I don't need all that. Just give me your company logo. I look at the logo, and it ties it to my brain. Then I come back to you. I'm focused on you, OK? You give me your quick, 15-second or 30-second intro, grab my attention. Then you give me a quick business overview. This is not a five-minute pitch. This is, you know, two sentences. "We build widgets for the X, Y, Z market." Or, "We sell services to help do X." You know, whatever. And that is like the picture on the outside of a jigsaw puzzle box. That lets me know the context. It gives me the armature for the whole thing you'll be going through; it lets me put everything in relation to what you've told me. Then you've got to walk me through, show me who your management team is. I want to know the size of the market. Why is this market worth getting at? I want to know your product, that's very important. Now, this is not a product pitch or sales pitch. I don't want to know all the ins and outs, just what the heck is it? If it's a website, show me a screenshot of your website. Don't do a live demo. Never do a live demo. Do a canned demo, or something that lets me know why people are going to buy whatever it is. Now that I know what you're selling, tell me how you make money on it. For every X you sell, you get Y, or services of Z. I want to know what the business model is on a per-unit basis, or for the actual product you're selling. I want to know who you're selling to in terms of customers and if you have any special relationships that will help you, whether it's a distribution relationship or a producing partner. Again, validation. This helps to say you're bigger than just one little thing over here. But everybody has competition. There's never been a company with no competition, even if the competition is the old way of doing something. I want to know exactly what your competition is, and that will help me judge how you fit into the whole operation. I want to know how you're special. I know what your competition does — how are you going to prevent them from eating your lunch? All this ties into the financial overview. And you can't do a VC pitch without giving me your financials. I want to know a year or two back, or as long as you've been in existence. And I want to know four or five years forward. Five is a bit much. Probably four. And I want to know how that business model, on a product basis, will translate into a company model: How many widgets will you sell? You make X amount per widget. I want to know what the driver is. We'll have 1,000 customers this year and 10,000 the next, our revenues will do this and that. That gives me the whole picture for the next several years into which I'm investing. And I want to know how the money from me will help you get there. You're going to open an offshore plant in China, you're going to spend it all on sales and marketing, you're going to go to Tahiti, whatever. But then comes the ask, where you tell me how much you want. You're looking for 5 million — at what valuation? Two million? 100,000? What's the money in so far? Who invested? I hope you invested — if you can't invest in your own thing, why should I? So I like to know if you have friends and family, or angel investors, or more VCs before. What's the capital structure up until this point? Finally, having done all that, you've now told me the whole thing, so now you bring it back to that conclusion. This is that rocket going up. Hopefully everything has been positive. And everything you say clicks, it all makes sense. And I'm thinking, "This is really great!" Then you take me back to just your logo on the screen. And I look at the logo — OK, good. Now I come back to you. Nothing else to look at, right? Now you've got to wrap it up to give me the final — boom! — the final pitch that's going to send me into space. Now, in the process of doing this, how do you remember the sequences and do it? You've noticed I'm not looking at the screen, right? The screen is in front of me, so I couldn't even see if I wanted to. So how do I know what's going on? Well, I have a laptop in front of me. You're looking at me and at this. What am I looking at? You think that I'm looking at that? No, I'm looking, actually, at a special version of PowerPoint over here, which shows me the slides ahead and behind, my notes, so I can see what's going on. PowerPoint has this built into every copy of it that's shipped. If you use Apple's Keynote, it's got an even better version. There's another program called Ovation you can get from Adobe that they bought last summer, which helps you run the timers and lets you figure out what's going on. So, here's my wrap-up to take you to the moon, right? I usually do a Top 10, but we don't have time, so: David's Top Five Presentation Tips. Number five: always use presenter mode, or Ovation, or presenter tools. It lets you know exactly where you're going, helps you pace yourself, gives you a timer, the whole bit. Number four: always use remote control. Have you seen me touch the computer? No. Why not? Because I'm using remote control. Always use remote control. Number three: the handouts you give are not your presentation. If you follow my suggestions, you'll have a very spare, Zen-like presentation, which is great to convey who you are and get people emotionally involved, but not good as a handout. You want a handout that gives more information; it has to stand without you. Number two: don't read your speech. Can you imagine? (Reading) "You should invest in my company ... " It doesn't work. And the number one presentation tip: never, ever look at the screen. You're making a connection with your audience, and you always want a one-on-one connection. The screen should come up behind you and supplement what you're doing, instead of replace you. And that is how to pitch to a VC.

Health and the human mind

Marvin Minsky

{0: 'Marvin Minsky'}

{0: ['ai pioneer']}

{0: 'Marvin Minsky is one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence -- and using computing metaphors to understand the human mind. His contributions to mathematics, robotics and computational linguistics are legendary and far-reaching.'}

2003-02-02

2008-09-22

TED2003

en

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

['brain', 'health', 'humanity', 'humor', 'science', 'technology', 'psychology', 'evolutionary psychology']

{125: 'How brain science will change computing', 320: 'A computer that works like the brain', 229: 'My stroke of insight', 515: 'To upgrade is human', 44: 'A philosophical quest for our biggest problems', 1580: 'Smart failure for a fast-changing world'}

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

Listen closely -- Marvin Minsky's arch, eclectic, charmingly offhand talk on health, overpopulation and the human mind is packed with subtlety: wit, wisdom and just an ounce of wily, is-he-joking? advice.

If you ask people about what part of psychology do they think is hard, and you say, "Well, what about thinking and emotions?" Most people will say, "Emotions are terribly hard. They're incredibly complex. They can't — I have no idea of how they work. But thinking is really very straightforward: it's just sort of some kind of logical reasoning, or something. But that's not the hard part." So here's a list of problems that come up. One nice problem is, what do we do about health? The other day, I was reading something, and the person said probably the largest single cause of disease is handshaking in the West. And there was a little study about people who don't handshake, and comparing them with ones who do handshake. And I haven't the foggiest idea of where you find the ones that don't handshake, because they must be hiding. And the people who avoid that have 30 percent less infectious disease or something. Or maybe it was 31 and a quarter percent. So if you really want to solve the problem of epidemics and so forth, let's start with that. And since I got that idea, I've had to shake hundreds of hands. And I think the only way to avoid it is to have some horrible visible disease, and then you don't have to explain. Education: how do we improve education? Well, the single best way is to get them to understand that what they're being told is a whole lot of nonsense. And then, of course, you have to do something about how to moderate that, so that anybody can — so they'll listen to you. Pollution, energy shortage, environmental diversity, poverty. How do we make stable societies? Longevity. Okay, there're lots of problems to worry about. Anyway, the question I think people should talk about — and it's absolutely taboo — is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be? And it's a sort of choice we have to make. Most people are about 60 inches high or more, and there's these cube laws. So if you make them this big, by using nanotechnology, I suppose — (Laughter) — then you could have a thousand times as many. That would solve the problem, but I don't see anybody doing any research on making people smaller. Now, it's nice to reduce the population, but a lot of people want to have children. And there's one solution that's probably only a few years off. You know you have 46 chromosomes. If you're lucky, you've got 23 from each parent. Sometimes you get an extra one or drop one out, but — so you can skip the grandparent and great-grandparent stage and go right to the great-great-grandparent. And you have 46 people and you give them a scanner, or whatever you need, and they look at their chromosomes and each of them says which one he likes best, or she — no reason to have just two sexes any more, even. So each child has 46 parents, and I suppose you could let each group of 46 parents have 15 children. Wouldn't that be enough? And then the children would get plenty of support, and nurturing, and mentoring, and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy. Timesharing is a little further off in the future. And there's this great novel that Arthur Clarke wrote twice, called "Against the Fall of Night" and "The City and the Stars." They're both wonderful and largely the same, except that computers happened in between. And Arthur was looking at this old book, and he said, "Well, that was wrong. The future must have some computers." So in the second version of it, there are 100 billion or 1,000 billion people on Earth, but they're all stored on hard disks or floppies, or whatever they have in the future. And you let a few million of them out at a time. A person comes out, they live for a thousand years doing whatever they do, and then, when it's time to go back for a billion years — or a million, I forget, the numbers don't matter — but there really aren't very many people on Earth at a time. And you get to think about yourself and your memories, and before you go back into suspension, you edit your memories and you change your personality and so forth. The plot of the book is that there's not enough diversity, so that the people who designed the city make sure that every now and then an entirely new person is created. And in the novel, a particular one named Alvin is created. And he says, maybe this isn't the best way, and wrecks the whole system. I don't think the solutions that I proposed are good enough or smart enough. I think the big problem is that we're not smart enough to understand which of the problems we're facing are good enough. Therefore, we have to build super intelligent machines like HAL. As you remember, at some point in the book for "2001," HAL realizes that the universe is too big, and grand, and profound for those really stupid astronauts. If you contrast HAL's behavior with the triviality of the people on the spaceship, you can see what's written between the lines. Well, what are we going to do about that? We could get smarter. I think that we're pretty smart, as compared to chimpanzees, but we're not smart enough to deal with the colossal problems that we face, either in abstract mathematics or in figuring out economies, or balancing the world around. So one thing we can do is live longer. And nobody knows how hard that is, but we'll probably find out in a few years. You see, there's two forks in the road. We know that people live twice as long as chimpanzees almost, and nobody lives more than 120 years, for reasons that aren't very well understood. But lots of people now live to 90 or 100, unless they shake hands too much or something like that. And so maybe if we lived 200 years, we could accumulate enough skills and knowledge to solve some problems. So that's one way of going about it. And as I said, we don't know how hard that is. It might be — after all, most other mammals live half as long as the chimpanzee, so we're sort of three and a half or four times, have four times the longevity of most mammals. And in the case of the primates, we have almost the same genes. We only differ from chimpanzees, in the present state of knowledge, which is absolute hogwash, maybe by just a few hundred genes. What I think is that the gene counters don't know what they're doing yet. And whatever you do, don't read anything about genetics that's published within your lifetime, or something. (Laughter) The stuff has a very short half-life, same with brain science. And so it might be that if we just fix four or five genes, we can live 200 years. Or it might be that it's just 30 or 40, and I doubt that it's several hundred. So this is something that people will be discussing and lots of ethicists — you know, an ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind. (Laughter) And it's very hard to find an ethicist who considers any change worth making, because he says, what about the consequences? And, of course, we're not responsible for the consequences of what we're doing now, are we? Like all this complaint about clones. And yet two random people will mate and have this child, and both of them have some pretty rotten genes, and the child is likely to come out to be average. Which, by chimpanzee standards, is very good indeed. If we do have longevity, then we'll have to face the population growth problem anyway. Because if people live 200 or 1,000 years, then we can't let them have a child more than about once every 200 or 1,000 years. And so there won't be any workforce. And one of the things Laurie Garrett pointed out, and others have, is that a society that doesn't have people of working age is in real trouble. And things are going to get worse, because there's nobody to educate the children or to feed the old. And when I'm talking about a long lifetime, of course, I don't want somebody who's 200 years old to be like our image of what a 200-year-old is — which is dead, actually. You know, there's about 400 different parts of the brain which seem to have different functions. Nobody knows how most of them work in detail, but we do know that there're lots of different things in there. And they don't always work together. I like Freud's theory that most of them are cancelling each other out. And so if you think of yourself as a sort of city with a hundred resources, then, when you're afraid, for example, you may discard your long-range goals, but you may think deeply and focus on exactly how to achieve that particular goal. You throw everything else away. You become a monomaniac — all you care about is not stepping out on that platform. And when you're hungry, food becomes more attractive, and so forth. So I see emotions as highly evolved subsets of your capability. Emotion is not something added to thought. An emotional state is what you get when you remove 100 or 200 of your normally available resources. So thinking of emotions as the opposite of — as something less than thinking is immensely productive. And I hope, in the next few years, to show that this will lead to smart machines. And I guess I better skip all the rest of this, which are some details on how we might make those smart machines and — (Laughter) — and the main idea is in fact that the core of a really smart machine is one that recognizes that a certain kind of problem is facing you. This is a problem of such and such a type, and therefore there's a certain way or ways of thinking that are good for that problem. So I think the future, main problem of psychology is to classify types of predicaments, types of situations, types of obstacles and also to classify available and possible ways to think and pair them up. So you see, it's almost like a Pavlovian — we lost the first hundred years of psychology by really trivial theories, where you say, how do people learn how to react to a situation? What I'm saying is, after we go through a lot of levels, including designing a huge, messy system with thousands of ports, we'll end up again with the central problem of psychology. Saying, not what are the situations, but what are the kinds of problems and what are the kinds of strategies, how do you learn them, how do you connect them up, how does a really creative person invent a new way of thinking out of the available resources and so forth. So, I think in the next 20 years, if we can get rid of all of the traditional approaches to artificial intelligence, like neural nets and genetic algorithms and rule-based systems, and just turn our sights a little bit higher to say, can we make a system that can use all those things for the right kind of problem? Some problems are good for neural nets; we know that others, neural nets are hopeless on them. Genetic algorithms are great for certain things; I suspect I know what they're bad at, and I won't tell you. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

The psychology of evil

Philip Zimbardo

{0: 'Philip Zimbardo'}

{0: ['psychologist']}

{0: 'Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment -- and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib. His book The Lucifer Effect explores the nature of evil; now, in his new work, he studies the nature of heroism.'}

2008-02-02

2008-09-23

TED2008

en

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

['children', 'crime', 'culture', 'education', 'evil', 'global issues', 'peace', 'prison', 'psychology']

{163: 'The surprising decline in violence', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 13585: 'How to stop screwing yourself over', 2537: "Why you think you're right -- even if you're wrong", 2207: 'What I learned as a kid in jail'}

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

Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.

Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. I grew up in the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto in New York, and I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are who grew up in an inner city. And I had friends who were really good kids, who lived out the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde scenario — Robert Louis Stevenson. That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to jail. Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance. So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction. The only question is, what was in the juice? And more importantly, that line between good and evil — which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side, the others on the bad side — I knew that line was movable, and it was permeable. Good people could be seduced across that line, and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover with help, with reform, with rehabilitation. So I want to begin with this wonderful illusion by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher. If you look at it and focus on the white, what you see is a world full of angels. But let's look more deeply, and as we do, what appears is the demons, the devils in the world. That tells us several things. One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition. It tells me something else. If you remember, God's favorite angel was Lucifer. Apparently, Lucifer means "the light." It also means "the morning star," in some scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins. Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil. So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives — the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are — leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google "evil," a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second. A few years ago — I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was, with the revelation of American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And these were men and women who were putting prisoners through unbelievable humiliation. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised, because I had seen those same visual parallels when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study. Immediately the Bush administration military said what? What all administrations say when there's a scandal: "Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers." My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually. Maybe it was the barrel that was bad. But how am I going to deal with that hypothesis? I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, and in that position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports. I had access to him. I could study him, have him come to my home, get to know him, do psychological analysis to see, was he a good apple or bad apple. And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures that these soldiers took. These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature. All of them come from the cameras of American soldiers. Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera, they took pictures of everything, more than 1,000. And what I've done is I organized them into various categories. But these are by United States military police, army reservists. They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all. And it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift. Why? Tier 1-A was the center for military intelligence. It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there. Interrogators from Titan Corporation, all there, and they're getting no information about the insurgency. So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves off. Those are the euphemisms, and this is how it was interpreted. Let's go down to that dungeon. (Typewriting) [Abu Ghraib Iraq Prison Abuses 2008 Military Police Guards' Photos] [The following images include nudity and graphic depictions of violence] (Camera shutter sounds) (Thuds) (Camera shutter) (Camera shutter) (Breathing) (Bells) (Bells end) So, pretty horrific. That's one of the visual illustrations of evil. And it should not have escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill. That prisoner covered himself with shit every day, they had to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink. But the guards ended up calling him "Shit Boy." What was he doing in that prison rather than in some mental institution? In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He comes down and says, "I want to know, who is responsible? Who are the bad apples?" Well, that's a bad question. You have to reframe it and ask, "What is responsible?" "What" could be the who of people, but it could also be the what of the situation, and obviously that's wrongheaded. How do psychologists try to understand such transformations of human character, if you believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon? There are three ways. The main way is called dispositional. We look at what's inside of the person, the bad apples. This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah, people are the actors on the stage, but you'll have to be aware of the situation. Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume? Is there a stage director?" And so we're interested in what are the external factors around the individual — the bad barrel? Social scientists stop there and they miss the big point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers. If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you've got to know where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation? My recent book, "The Lucifer Effect," is about, how do you understand how good people turn evil? And it has a lot of detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So Dr. Z's "Lucifer Effect," although it focuses on evil, really is a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive, and it makes some of us villains. And the good news that I'm going to hopefully come to at the end is that it makes some of us heroes. This wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker summarizes my whole talk: "I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances." (Laughter) There's a study some of you think you know about, but very few people have ever read the story. You watched the movie. This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx, and he asked the question, "Could the Holocaust happen here, now?" People say, "No, that's Nazi Germany, Hitler, you know, that's 1939." He said, "Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you, 'Would you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, I'm a good person.'" He said, "Why don't we put you in a situation and give you a chance to see what you would do?" And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people. 500 New Haven, Connecticut, 500 Bridgeport. And the ad said, "Psychologists want to understand memory. We want to improve people's memory, because it is the key to success." OK? "We're going to give you five bucks — four dollars for your time. We don't want college students. We want men between 20 and 50." In the later studies, they ran women. Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people. So, you go down, one of you will be a learner, one will be a teacher. The learner's a genial, middle-aged guy. He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room. The learner could be middle-aged, could be as young as 20. And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab coat, "Your job as teacher is to give him material to learn. Gets it right, reward. Gets it wrong, you press a button on the shock box. The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it." That's the key. All evil starts with 15 volts. And then the next step is another 15 volts. The problem is, at the end of the line, it's 450 volts. And as you go along, the guy is screaming, "I've got a heart condition! I'm out of here!" You're a good person. You complain. "Sir, who will be responsible if something happens to him?" The experimenter says, "Don't worry, I will be responsible. Continue, teacher." And the question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts? You should notice here, when it gets up to 375, it says, "Danger. Severe Shock." When it gets up to here, there's "XXX" — the pornography of power. So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists, "What percent of American citizens would go to the end?" They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior, and we know, psychiatry knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic. OK. Here's the data. They could not be more wrong. Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about women? Study 13 — no different than men. So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts. And it's like a dial on human nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the majority, down to none. What are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real world? 912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered by family and friends in Guyana jungle in 1978, because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor — not their priest — their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones. He persuaded them to commit mass suicide. And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people. Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual behavior. Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class in James Monroe in the Bronx, 1954. I did this study with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney — and it also began work with an ad. We had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life. 75 people volunteered, took personality tests. We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation. And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who will be guards and those who will be prisoners. To the prisoners, we said, "Wait at home. The study will begin Sunday." We didn't tell them that the city police were going to come and do realistic arrests. (Video) (Music) [Day 1] Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car. It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo Alto. They took me to the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously. Here are the prisoners, who are going to be dehumanized, they'll become numbers. Here are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours. The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five kids had emotional breakdowns. Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? If they're anonymous, how do they treat their victims? In some cultures, they go to war without changing their appearance. In others, they paint themselves like "Lord of the Flies." In some, they wear masks. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson, found 23 cultures that had two bits of data. Do they change their appearance? 15. Do they kill, torture, mutilate? 13. If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 — that's 90 percent — kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity. So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others. De-individuation of self. Diffusion of personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group norms. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference. And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response patterns don't work. Your personality and morality are disengaged. "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him," Dostoyevsky. Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-ology. So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological processes. Real world parallels? Compare this with this. James Schlesinger — I'm going to end with this — says, "Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances." That's the Lucifer effect. And he goes on to say, "The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military operations." If you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse. They knew that, and let that happen. So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. In this report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and because it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time. Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching the store? The answer is nobody, I think on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon. So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas. The shift is away from the medical model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a disease. Violence is a disease. Since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the individual level. It doesn't work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." That means that line is not out there. That's a decision that you have to make, a personal thing. So I want to end very quickly on a positive note. Heroism as the antidote to evil, by promoting the heroic imagination, especially in our kids, in our educational system. We want kids to think, "I'm a hero in waiting, waiting for the right situation to come along, and I will act heroically. My whole life, I'm now going to focus away from evil — that I've been in since I was a kid — to understanding heroes. Banality of heroism. It's ordinary people who do heroic deeds. It's the counterpoint to Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil." Our traditional societal heroes are wrong, because they are the exceptions. They organize their life around this. That's why we know their names. Our kids' heroes are also wrong models for them, because they have supernatural talents. We want our kids to realize most heroes are everyday people, and the heroic act is unusual. This is Joe Darby. He was the one that stopped those abuses you saw, because when he saw those images, he turned them over to a senior investigating officer. He was a low-level private, and that stopped it. Was he a hero? No. They had to put him in hiding, because people wanted to kill him, and then his mother and his wife. For three years, they were in hiding. This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control, I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners nor guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." And I ended the study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year. (Laughter) (Applause) I just came to my senses, obviously. So situations have the power to do [three things]. But the point is, this is the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation and you're on one side or the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, "Don't get involved. Mind your own business." And you have to say, "Mama, humanity is my business." So the psychology of heroism is — we're going to end in a moment — how do we encourage children in new hero courses, that I'm working on with Matt Langdon — he has a hero workshop — to develop this heroic imagination, this self-labeling, "I am a hero in waiting," and teach them skills. To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. Who act. The key to heroism is two things. You have to act when other people are passive. B: You have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically. And I want to end with a known story about Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker standing on a subway. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75 people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the guy's white, and he's got two kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks, puts the guy between the tracks, lays on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy — 20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his head off. And he said, "I did what anyone could do," no big deal to jump on the tracks. And the moral imperative is "I did what everyone should do." And so one day, you will be in a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. Evil, meaning you're going to be Arthur Andersen. You're going to cheat, or you're going to allow bullying. Path two, you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is, are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me by. So the point is thinking it and then doing it. So I want to thank you. Thank you. Let's oppose the power of evil systems at home and abroad, and let's focus on the positive. Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing. Thanks so much. (Applause)

Remember to say thank you

Laura Trice

{0: 'Laura Trice'}

{0: ['counselor', 'coach and baker']}

{0: 'Laura Trice is a counselor, life coach -- and purveyor of wholesome junk food.'}

2008-02-02

2008-09-24

TED2008

en

['ar', 'az', 'bg', 'bn', 'ca', 'cs', 'da', 'de', 'el', 'en', 'es', 'et', 'fa', 'fr', 'he', 'hi', 'hr', 'hu', 'hy', 'id', 'it', 'ja', 'kk', 'ko', 'ku', 'lt', 'lv', 'mk', 'mr', 'ms', 'my', 'nb', 'ne', 'nl', 'pl', 'pt', 'pt-br', 'ro', 'ru', 'sk', 'sl', 'sq', 'sr', 'sv', 'tg', 'th', 'tr', 'tt', 'uk', 'ur', 'uz', 'vi', 'zh-cn', 'zh-tw']

['communication', 'culture', 'happiness', 'parenting']

{73: 'In praise of slowness', 201: 'The lost art of letter-writing', 70: '8 secrets of success', 1136: 'The mothers who found forgiveness, friendship', 1675: 'Agile programming -- for your family', 1974: 'For parents, happiness is a very high bar'}

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

In this deceptively simple 3-minute talk, Dr. Laura Trice muses on the power of the magic words "thank you" -- to deepen a friendship, to repair a bond, to make sure another person knows what they mean to you. Try it.

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

Playtime with Pleo, your robotic dinosaur friend

Caleb Chung

{0: 'Caleb Chung'}

{0: ['toy designer']}

{0: "Caleb Chung dreams up toys that interact with children. He's the inventor of Furby, a talking (and listening) robotic furball that sold some 50 million units in the late '90s. His newest plaything: Pleo the adorable robot dinosaur."}

2007-12-12

2008-09-25

EG 2007

en

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

['children', 'design', 'dinosaurs', 'entertainment', 'happiness', 'invention', 'play', 'technology', 'toy', 'Best of the Web']

{280: 'Robots inspired by cockroach ingenuity', 146: 'Spore, birth of a game', 288: 'One Laptop per Child, two years on', 1743: 'Hack a banana, make a keyboard!', 428: 'Digging up dinosaurs', 271: 'Archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...'}

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

Pleo the robot dinosaur acts like a living pet -- exploring, cuddling, playing, reacting and learning. Inventor Caleb Chung talks about Pleo and his wild toy career at EG07, on the week that Pleo shipped to stores for the first time.

I'm a, or was, or kind of am a toy designer. And before I was a toy designer, oh, I was a mime, a street mime, actually. And then I was an entertainer, I guess. And before that, I was a silversmith, and before that, I was — I was out of the house at about 15 and a half, and I never wound up going into college. I didn't really — I didn't see the point at the time. I do now, after learning about all the quantum stuff. (Laughter) It's really cool. Anyway, I wanted to show you a little bit about the world of toy design, at least from my small aperture of the world. This is a video I made when I first started doing toy design. I'm in my garage, making weird stuff. And then you go to these toy companies and there's some guy across the table, and he goes, "Pass. Pass. Pass." You know, you think it's so cool, but they — anyway, I made this little tape that I'd always show when I go in. This is the name of my company, Giving Toys. So I used to work at Mattel, actually. And after I left Mattel, I started all these hamburger makers, and then got the license to make the maker. So this is a hamburger maker that you take the peanut butter and stuff and you put it in there, and it makes — and this is a French fry maker, little, tiny food you can eat. I beat up the pasta maker to make that. Then this is a McNugget maker, I think. This, now that's the McNugget maker, and this is a — this is my oldest daughter making a McApple Pie. And let's see, you can make the pie and cinnamon and sugar, and then you eat, and you eat, and you eat, and you — she's about 300 pounds now. No, she's not, she's beautiful. This is how they looked when they came out at the end. These are a — this is like a 15 million dollar line. And it got me through some — I didn't make any royalties on this, but it got me through. Next is a compilation of a bunch of stuff. That was a missile foam launcher that didn't get sold. This is a squishy head, for no apparent reason. This is some effects that I did for "Wig, Rattle and Roll." That was a robot eye thing controlling it in the back. That paid the rent for about a month. This is a walking Barbie — I said, "Oh, this is it!" And they go, "Oh, that's really nice," and out it goes. So this is some fighting robots. I thought everyone would want these. They fight, they get back up, you know? Wouldn't this be cool? And they made it into a toy, and then they dropped it like a hot rock. They're pretty cool. This is a— we're doing some flight-testing on my little pug, seeing if this can really grab. It does pretty good. I'm using little phone connectors to make them so they can spin. It's how they, see, have those album things — kids don't know what they are. This is a clay maker. You know, I said — I went to Play-Doh, and said, "Look, I can animate this." They said, "Don't talk to us about Play-Doh." And then, I made a Lego animator. I thought, this would be so great! And you know, Lego — don't take Legos to Lego. That's the answer. They know everything about it. Then I started doing animatronics. I loved dinosaurs. I used to be in the film business, kind of, and actually, Nicholas Negroponte saw this when I was, like, 12, and anyway, so then they said, "No, you have to make two and they have to fight." You know, how — why would a kid want a dinosaur? This is me using [unclear] or 3-D Studio, back in the '80s. That's David Letterman. You can see how old this stuff is. That's my youngest cousin. This is a segment called, "Dangerous Toys You Won't See at Christmas." We had my first saw blade launcher and we had a flamethrower chair. My career basically peaked here. And in the back are foam-core cutouts of the people who couldn't make it to the show. This is MEK going through a windshield wiper motor. So this is a — I used to kind of be an actor. And I'm really not very good at it. But the — this is a guy named Dr. Yatz, who would take toys apart and show kids about engineering. And you can see the massively parallel processing Nintendos there. And over to the left is a view master of the CD-ROM. And a guy named Stan Reznikov did this as a pilot. This is a — you can see the little window there. You can actually see the Steadicam with a bubble on the bottom. You see the keyboard strapped to my wrist. Way ahead of my time here. (Video) I'm getting dizzy ... Narrator: I love toys! Caleb Chung: That's all I wanted to say there. I love toys. OK, so, so that was a, that was the first kind of a — that was the first batch of products. Most of them did not go. You get one out of 20, one out of 30 products. And every now and then, we do something like a, you know, an automated hair wrap machine, you know, that tangles your hair and pulls your scalp out, and — and we'd make some money on that, you know. And we'd give it out. But eventually, we left L.A., and we moved to Idaho, where there was actually a lot of peace and quiet. And I started working on this project — oh, I have to tell you about this real quick. Throughout this whole thing, making toys, I think there is a real correlation with innovation and art and science. There's some kind of a blend that happens that allows, you know, to find innovation. And I tried to sum this up in some kind of symbol that means something, to me anyway. And so, art and science have a kind of dynamic balance, that's where I think innovation happens. And actually, this is, to me, how I can come up with great ideas. But it's not how you actually get leverage. Actually, you have to put a circle around that, and call it business. And those three together, I think, give you leverage in the world. But moving on. So, this is a quick tale I'm going to tell. This is the Furby tale. As he said, I was co-inventor of the Furby. I did the body and creature — well, you'll see. So by way of showing you this, you can kind of get an understanding of what it is to, hopefully, try to create robotic life forms, or technology that has an emotional connection with the user. So this is my family. This is my wife, Christi, and Abby, and Melissa, and my 17-year-old now, Emily, who was just a pack of trouble. All right, there's that robot again. I came out of the movie business, as I said, and I said, let's make these animatronic robots. Let's make these things. And so I've always had a big interest in this. This one actually didn't go anywhere, but I got my feet wet doing this. This is a smaller one, and I have a little moving torso on there. A little, tiny guy walks along. More servo drives, lots of servo hacking, lots of mechanical stuff. There's another one. He actually has skeletor legs, I think, he's wearing there. Oh, this is a little pony, little pony — very cute little thing. The point of showing these is I've always been interested in little artificial life pieces. So the challenge was — I worked for Microsoft for a little bit, working on the Microsoft Barney. And this is a — you know, the purple dinosaur with kind of bloat wear. And, you know, they had lots, just lots of stuff in there that you didn't need, I thought. And then Microsoft can just fill a, you know, a warehouse full of this stuff and see if they sell. So it's a really strange business model compared to coming from a toy company. But anyway, a friend of mine and I, Dave Hampton, decided to see if we could do like a single-cell organism. What's the fewest pieces we could use to make a little life form? And that's our little, thirty-cent Mabuchi motor. And so, I have all these design books, like I'm sure many of you have. And throughout the books — this is the first page on Furby — I have kind of the art and science. I have the why over here, and the how over there. I try to do a lot of philosophy, a lot of thinking about all of these projects. Because they're not just "bing" ideas; you have to really dig deep in these things. So there's some real pseudo-code over here, and getting the idea of different kind of drives, things like that. And originally, Furby only had two eyes and some batteries on the bottom. And then we said, well, you're going to feed him, and he needs to talk, and it got more complicated. And then I had to figure out how I'm going to use that one motor to make the eyes move, and the ears move, and the body to move, and the mouth to move. And, you know, I want to make it blink and do all that at the same time. Well, I came up with this kind of linear expression thing with these cams and feedback. And that worked pretty well. Then I started to get a little more realistic and I have to start drawing the stuff. And there's my "note to self" at the top: "lots of engineering." So that turned out to be a little more than true. There's my first exploded view and all the little pieces and the little worm drive and all that stuff. And then I've got to start building it, so this is the real thing. I get up and start cutting my finger and gluing things together. And that's my little workshop. And there's the first little cam that drove Furby. And there's Furby on the half shell. You can see the little BB in the box is my tilt sensor. I just basically gnawed all this stuff out of plastic. So there's the back of his head with a billion holes in it. And there I am. I'm done. There's my little Furby. No, it's a little robot on heroin or something, I think. (Laughter) So right now, you see, I love little robots. So my wife says, "Well, you may like it, but nobody else will." So she comes to the rescue. This is my wife Christi, who is just, you know, my muse and my partner for eternity here. And she does drawings, right? She's an actual, you know, artist. And she starts doing all these different drawings and does color patterns and coloring books. And I like the guy with the cigar at the bottom there. He didn't test so well, but I like him. And then she started doing these other images. At that time, Beanie Babies was a big hit, and we thought, we'll do a bunch of different ones. So here's a little pink one, a little pouf on his head. And here's — this didn't do so well in testing either, I don't know why. There's my favorite, Demon Furby. That was a good one. Anyway, finally settled on kind of this kind of a look, little poufy body, a little imaginary character. And there he is, a little bush baby on — caught in the headlights there. I actually went to Toys"R"Us, got a little furry cat, ripped it apart and made this. And since then, every time I come home from Toys"R"Us with dolls or something, they disappear from my desk and they get hidden in the house. I have three girls and they just, they — it's like a rescue animal thing they're going there. (Laughter) So, a little tether coming off, it's just a control for the Fur's mouth and his eyes. It's just a little server control and I made a little video going: "Hi, my name's Furby, and I'm good," you know, and then I'd reach my hand. He'd — you can tickle him. When I put my hand up, "Ha, ha, ha, ha" and that's how we sold him. And Hasbro actually said, I meant Tiger Electronics at the time, said, "Yeah, we want to do this. We have, you know, 13 weeks or something to Toy Fair, and we're going to hire you guys to do this." And so Dave and I got working. Mostly me, because it was all mechanics at this point. So now I have to really figure out all kinds of stuff I don't know how to do. And I started working with Solid Works and a whole other group to do that. And we started — this was way back before there was really much SLA going on, not a lot of rapid prototyping. We certainly didn't have the money to do this. They only paid me, like, a little bit of money to do this, so I had to call a friend of a friend who was running the GM prototype plant, SLA plant, that was down. And they said, "Yeah, well, we'll run them." So they ran all the shells for us, which was nice of them. And the cams I got cut at Hewlett Packard. We snuck in on the weekend. And so we just had a disc of the files. But they have a closed system, so you couldn't print the things out on the machine. So we actually printed them out on clear and taped them on the monitors. And on the weekend we ran the parts for that. So this is how they come out close to the end. And then they looked like little Garfields there. Eight months later — you may remember this, this was a — total, total, total chaos. For a while, they were making two million Furbys a month. They actually wound up doing about 40 million Furbys. I — it's unbelievable how — I don't know how that can be. And Hasbro made about, you know, a billion and a half dollars. And I just a little bit on each one. So full circle — why do I do this? Why do you, you know, try to do this stuff? And it's, of course, for your kids. And there's my youngest daughter with her Furbys. And she still actually has those. So I kind of retired, and we're already living in paradise up in Boise, on a river, you know. So and then I started another company called Toy Innovation and we did some projects with Mattel with actually with a lady who's here, Ivy Ross, and we did Miracle Moves Baby, made it in Wired magazine, did a bunch of other stuff. And then I started another company. We did a little hand-held device for teens that could hook up to the Internet, won "Best Innovations" at CES, but really I kind of slowed down and said, OK, I just ... After a while, I had this old tape of this dinosaur, and I gave it to this guy, and this other guy saw it, and then people started to want to do it. And they said they'd spend all this time. So I said, "OK, let's try to do this dinosaur project." The crazy idea is we're going to try to clone a dinosaur as much as we can with today's technology. And it's not really — but as close as we can do. And we're going to try to really pull this off, intentfully try to make something that seems like it's alive. Not a robot that kind of does, but let's really go for it. So I picked a Camarasaurus, because the Camarasaurus was the most abundant of the sauropods in North America. And you could actually find full fossil evidence of these. That's a juvenile. And so we actually went in. There's a book called "Walking on Eggshells," where they found actual sauropod skin in Patagonia. And the picture from the book, so when I — I told the sculptor to use this bump pattern, whatever you can to copy that. Very, very obsessive. There's a kind of truncated Camarasaurus skeleton, but the geometry's correct. And then I went in, and measured all the geometry because I figured, hey, biomimicry. If I do it kind of right, it might move kind of like the real thing. So there's the motor. And about this time, you know, all these other people are starting to help. Here's an example of what we did with the skull. There's the skull, there's my drawing of a skull. There's kind of the skin version of the soft tissue. There's the mechanism that would go in there, kind of a Geneva drive. There's some Solid Works versions of it. Here's some SLA parts of the same thing. And then, these are really crude pieces. We were just doing some tests here. There's the skull, pretty much the same shape as the Camarasaurus. There's a photorealistic eye behind a lens. And there's kind of the first exploded view, or see-through view. There's the first SLA version, and it already kind of has the feel, it has kind of a cuteness already. And the thing about blending science and art in this multidisciplinary stuff is you can do a robot, and then you go back and do the shape, and then you go back and forth. The servos in the front legs, we had to shape those like muscles. They had to fit within the envelope. There was a tremendous amount of work to get all that working right. All the neck and the tail are cable, so it moves smoothly and organically. And then, of course, you're not done yet. You have to get the look for the skin. The skin's a whole another thing, probably the hardest part. So you hire artists, and you try to get the look and feel of the character. Now, this is not — we're character designers, right? And we're still trying to keep with the real character. So, now you go back and you cover the whole thing with clay. Now you start doing the sculpture for this. And you can see we got a guy from — who's just a fanatic about dinosaurs to do the sculpting for us, down to the spoon-shaped teeth and everything. And then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting. And then, four years and 10 million dollars later, we have a little Pleo. John, do you want to bring him up? John Sosoka is our CTO, and is really the man that's done most of the work with our 40-person company. I'd like to give John a hand. He never gets recognition. This is John Sosoka. (Applause) So, thank you, John, thank you, and get back to work, all right, man? All right — (Laughter) — no, it's very painful, so — (Laughter) — these are little Pleos and you can probably see them. This — I on purpose — they go through life stages. So when you first get them, they're babies. And you — more you have them, kind of the older they get, and they kind of learn through their behavior. So this one, this one's actually asleep, and — hang on. Pleo, wake up. Pleo, come on. So this guy's listening to my voice here. But they have 40 sensors all over their body. They have seven processors, they have 14 motors, they have — but you don't care, do you? They're just cute, right? That's the idea, that's the idea. So you see — hey, come on. Hey, did you feel that? There's something big and loud over here. Hey. (Laughter) That's good, wake up, wake up, wake up. Yeah, they're like kids, you know. You, yeah, yeah. Okay, he's hungry. I'll show you what he's been doing for, for four years. Here, here, here. Have some money, Pleo. (Laughter) There you go. That's what the investors think, that it's just — (Laughter) — right, right. So they're really sweet little guys. And we're hoping that — you know, our belief is that humans need to feel empathy towards things in order to be more human. And we think we can help that out by having little creatures that you can love. Now these are not robots, they're kind of lovebots, you know. They do change over time. But mostly they evoke a feeling of caring. And we have a — I have a little something here. Now I do want to say that, you know, Ugobe is not there yet. We've just opened the door, and it's for all of you to step through it. We did include some things that are hopefully useful. Excuse me, Pleo. They — he has a USB and he has a SD card, so it's completely open architecture. So anyone can plug him — (Applause) — thank you. This is John over here. Anyone can take Pleo and they can totally redo his personality. You can make him bipolar, or as someone said, a — (Laughter) — you can change his homeostatic drives, or whatever you want to call them. Kids can just drag and drop, put in new sounds. We — actually, it's very hard to keep people from doing this. We have one animator who's taken it and he's done a take on the Budweiser beer commercial, and they're going, "Whassup," you know? (Laughter) You — so it's — yes, he likes that. So they're a handful. We hope you get one. I don't know what I'm missing to say, but as a last thing, I'd like to say is that if we continue along this path, we are designing our children's best friends. And there's a lot of social responsibility in that. That's why Pleo's soft and gentle and loving. And so I just — I hope we all dream well. Thank you. (Applause)

Human nature and the blank slate

Steven Pinker

{0: 'Steven Pinker'}

{0: ['psychologist']}

{0: 'Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature. '}

2003-02-28

2008-09-26

TED2003

en

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['brain', 'children', 'culture', 'language', 'philosophy', 'psychology', 'science', 'books']

{163: 'The surprising decline in violence', 97: 'The surprising science of happiness', 68: 'Progress is not a zero-sum game', 1653: 'Be an artist, right now!', 455: 'Using design to make ideas new', 1198: 'The origins of pleasure'}

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

Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits. Here, Pinker talks about his thesis, and why some people found it incredibly upsetting.

A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired. The book is called "The Blank Slate," based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience. The "blank slate" was an influential idea in the 20th century. Here are a few quotes indicating that: "Man has no nature," from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset; "Man has no instincts," from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu; "The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none," from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould. There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense. As many people have told me over the years, anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesn't all come from the outside. Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet won't, presumably because of some innate different between them. And anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable. There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, we're not born blank slates. One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals. If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a — kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here. But if you instead look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6,000-odd cultures. The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all, and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning, weapons, weather, attempts to control, the color white and a worldview. Also, genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured. This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they — using MRI — measured the distribution of gray matter — that is, the outer layer of the cortex — in a large sample of pairs of people. They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme, in which no difference is coded as purple, and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation. Well, this is what happens when you pair people up at random. By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex. This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA — fraternal twins. And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin. And here's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA — namely, clones or identical twins. And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter. Now, these aren't just differences in anatomy, like the shape of your ear lobes, but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams: "Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally." As you can see, there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap, meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney. Now, the cartoon is not such an exaggeration, because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities. And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied — but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth. My favorite example is a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad. When they walked into the lab in Minnesota, they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulettes; both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee, both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists, both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after, and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump. Now — the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results — namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities. Now, given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question, why should it have been such an appealing notion? Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial. The foremost is that if we're blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal, because zero equals zero equals zero. But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others, and according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality. Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates, we can perfect mankind — the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering. Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence. Well, in the book, I argue that these are, in fact, non sequiturs. And just to make a long story short: first of all, the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness. And so when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," he did not mean "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are clones." Rather, that all men are equal in terms of their rights, and that every person ought to be treated as an individual, and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to. Also, even if we were born with certain ignoble motives, they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior. That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts, and some of them can inhibit others. For example, there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense, and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history. So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed, that's not the only thing in the skull, and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them. In the book, I go over controversies such as this one, and a number of other hot buttons, hot zones, Chernobyls, third rails, and so on — including the arts, cloning, crime, free will, education, evolution, gender differences, God, homosexuality, infanticide, inequality, Marxism, morality, Nazism, parenting, politics, race, rape, religion, resource depletion, social engineering, technological risk and war. And needless to say, there were certain risks in taking on these subjects. When I wrote a first draft of the book, I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments, and here are some of the reactions that I got: "Better get a security camera for your house." "Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies." "Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio." "Do you have tenure?" (Laughter) Well, the book came out in October, and nothing terrible has happened. I — I like — There was indeed reason to be nervous, and there were moments in which I did feel nervous, knowing the history of what has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences. There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings. And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps. My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers, and published some data showing that left-handers are, on average, more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan. It's not clear, by the way, since then, whether that is an accurate generalization, but the data at the time seemed to support that. Well, pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters, death threats, ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals, coming from irate left-handers and their advocates, and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired. Well, the night is young, but the book has been out for half a year, and nothing terrible has happened. None of the dire professional consequences has taken place — I haven't been exiled from the city of Cambridge. But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received. I'll just put that list up for a few seconds, and see if you can guess which two — I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews. It's not violence and war, it's not race, it's not gender, it's not Marxism, it's not Nazism. They are: the arts and parenting. (Laughter) So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses, and I'll let you decide if whether they — the claims are really that outrageous. Let me start with the arts. I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art. There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts — decoration of surfaces and bodies — appears to be a human universal. The telling of stories, music, dance, poetry — found in all cultures, and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies: a preference for symmetrical forms, the use of repetition and variation, even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world, you have lines that are very close to three seconds long, separated by pauses. Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the 20th century, the arts are frequently said to be in decline. And I have a collection, probably 10 or 15 headlines, from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time. I'll give you a couple of representative quotes: "We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline, that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago, and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity." That's a quote from T. S. Eliot, a little more than 50 years ago. And a more recent one: "The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical. Serious book stores are losing their franchise, nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory, symphony orchestras are diluting their programs, public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms, classical radio stations are dwindling, museums are resorting to blockbuster shows, dance is dying." That's from Robert Brustein, the famous drama critic and director, in The New Republic about five years ago. Well, in fact, the arts are not in decline. I don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room, but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent. There are, of course, entirely new art forms and new media, many of which you've heard over these few days. By any economic standard, the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing, as you can tell from the price of opera tickets, by the number of books sold, by the number of books published, the number of musical titles released, the number of new albums and so on. The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres. One of them is in elite art since the 1930s — say, the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras, where most of the repertory is before 1930, or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums. In literary criticism and analysis, probably 40 or 50 years ago, literary critics were a kind of cultural hero; now they're kind of a national joke. And the humanities and arts programs in the universities, which by many measures, indeed are in decline. Students are staying away in droves, universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities. Well, here's a diagnosis. They didn't ask me, but by their own admission, they need all the help that they can get. And I would like to suggest that it's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature. A famous quotation can be found — if you look on the web, you can find it in literally scores of English core syllabuses — "In or about December 1910, human nature changed." A paraphrase of a quote by Virginia Woolf, and there's some debate as to what she actually meant by that. But it's very clear, looking at these syllabuses, that — it's used now as a way of saying that all forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries, or millennia, in the 20th century were discarded. The beauty and pleasure in art — probably a human universal — were — began to be considered saccharine, or kitsch, or commercial. Barnett Newman had a famous quote that "the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty" — which was considered bourgeois or tacky. And here's just one example. I mean, this is perhaps a representative example of the visual depiction of the female form in the 15th century; here is a representative example of the depiction of the female form in the 20th century. And, as you can see, there — something has changed in the way the elite arts appeal to the senses. Indeed, in movements of modernism and post-modernism, there was visual art without beauty, literature without narrative and plot, poetry without meter and rhyme, architecture and planning without ornament, human scale, green space and natural light, music without melody and rhythm, and criticism without clarity, attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition. (Laughter) Let me give just you an example to back up that last statement. But here, there — one of the most famous literary English scholars of our time is the Berkeley professor, Judith Butler. And here is an example of one of her analyses: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from the form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects ..." Well, you get the idea. By the way, this is one sentence — you can actually parse it. Well, the argument in "The Blank Slate" was that elite art and criticism in the 20th century, although not the arts in general, have disdained beauty, pleasure, clarity, insight and style. People are staying away from elite art and criticism. What a puzzle — I wonder why. Well, this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book. Someone asked me whether I stuck it in in order to deflect ire from discussions of gender and Nazism and race and so on. I won't comment on that. But it certainly inspired an energetic reaction from many university professors. Well, the other hot button is parenting. And the starting point is the — for that discussion was the fact that we have all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrial complex. Now, here is — here is a representative quote from a besieged mother: "I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice. I'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they'll grow up to be healthy adults. And I'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they'll grow up smart. And there are all kinds of play — clay for finger dexterity, word games for reading success, large motor play, small motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids." I think anyone who's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother. Well, here's some sobering facts about parenting. Most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless. They're useless because they don't control for heritability. They measure some correlation between what the parents do, how the children turn out and assume a causal relation: that the parenting shaped the child. Parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grow up to be articulate, parents who spank their kids have kids who grow up to be violent and so on. And very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for — that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on. Until the studies are redone with adoptive children, who provide an environment but not genes to their kids, we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid. The genetically controlled studies have some sobering results. Remember the Mallifert twins: separated at birth, then they meet in the patent office — remarkably similar. Well, what would have happened if the Mallifert twins had grown up together? You might think, well, then they'd be even more similar, because not only would they share their genes, but they would also share their environment. That would make them super-similar, right? Wrong. Identical twins, or any siblings, who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together. Everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect. A complementary finding, from a completely different methodology, is that adopted siblings reared together — the mirror image of identical twins reared apart, they share their parents, their home, their neighborhood, don't share their genes — end up not similar at all. OK — two different bodies of research with a similar finding. What it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run, but in part — only in part — by their genes, in part by their culture — the culture of the country at large and the children's own culture, namely their peer group — as we heard from Jill Sobule earlier today, that's what kids care about — and, to a very large extent, larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge, by chance: chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero; chance events as you live your life. So let me conclude with just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices. I think that the sciences of human nature — behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science — are going to, increasingly in the years to come, upset various dogmas, careers and deeply-held political belief systems. And that presents us with a choice. The choice is whether certain facts about humans, or topics, are to be considered taboos, forbidden knowledge, where we shouldn't go there because no good can come from it, or whether we should explore them honestly. I have my own answer to that question, which comes from a great artist of the 19th century, Anton Chekhov, who said, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like." And I think that the argument can't be put any more eloquently than that. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Robots will invade our lives

Rodney Brooks

{0: 'Rodney Brooks'}

{0: ['roboticist']}

{0: 'Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. The goal: a robot who can figure things out.'}

2003-02-02

2008-09-29

TED2003

en

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

['AI', 'design', 'humanity', 'intelligence', 'robots', 'technology']

{195: 'The sticky wonder of gecko feet', 165: 'Building "self-aware" robots', 162: 'My creations, a new form of life', 1709: 'A mini robot -- powered by your phone', 1070: 'The rise of personal robots', 1376: 'Robots that fly ... and cooperate'}

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

In this prophetic talk from 2003, roboticist Rodney Brooks talks about how robots are going to work their way into our lives -- starting with toys and moving into household chores ... and beyond.

What I want to tell you about today is how I see robots invading our lives at multiple levels, over multiple timescales. And when I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere. Assuming — despite all the dire predictions from many people about our future — assuming we're still around, I can't imagine the world not being populated with robots. And then the question is, well, if they're going to be here in 500 years, are they going to be everywhere sooner than that? Are they going to be around in 50 years? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely — there's going to be lots of robots everywhere. And in fact I think that's going to be a lot sooner than that. I think we're sort of on the cusp of robots becoming common, and I think we're sort of around 1978 or 1980 in personal computer years, where the first few robots are starting to appear. Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play Pong, a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that. And we're starting to see that same sort of thing with robots: LEGO Mindstorms, Furbies — who here — did anyone here have a Furby? Yeah, there's 38 million of them sold worldwide. They are pretty common. And they're a little tiny robot, a simple robot with some sensors, a little bit of processing actuation. On the right there is another robot doll, who you could get a couple of years ago. And just as in the early days, when there was a lot of sort of amateur interaction over computers, you can now get various hacking kits, how-to-hack books. And on the left there is a platform from Evolution Robotics, where you put a PC on, and you program this thing with a GUI to wander around your house and do various stuff. And then there's a higher price point sort of robot toys — the Sony Aibo. And on the right there, is one that the NEC developed, the PaPeRo, which I don't think they're going to release. But nevertheless, those sorts of things are out there. And we've seen, over the last two or three years, lawn-mowing robots, Husqvarna on the bottom, Friendly Robotics on top there, an Israeli company. And then in the last 12 months or so we've started to see a bunch of home-cleaning robots appear. The top left one is a very nice home-cleaning robot from a company called Dyson, in the U.K. Except it was so expensive — 3,500 dollars — they didn't release it. But at the bottom left, you see Electrolux, which is on sale. Another one from Karcher. At the bottom right is one that I built in my lab about 10 years ago, and we finally turned that into a product. And let me just show you that. We're going to give this away I think, Chris said, after the talk. This is a robot that you can go out and buy, and that will clean up your floor. And it starts off sort of just going around in ever-increasing circles. If it hits something — you people see that? Now it's doing wall-following, it's following around my feet to clean up around me. Let's see, let's — oh, who stole my Rice Krispies? They stole my Rice Krispies! (Laughter) Don't worry, relax, no, relax, it's a robot, it's smart! (Laughter) See, the three-year-old kids, they don't worry about it. It's grown-ups that get really upset. (Laughter) We'll just put some crap here. (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) I don't know if you see — so, I put a bunch of Rice Krispies there, I put some pennies, let's just shoot it at that, see if it cleans up. Yeah, OK. So — we'll leave that for later. (Applause) Part of the trick was building a better cleaning mechanism, actually; the intelligence on board was fairly simple. And that's true with a lot of robots. We've all, I think, become, sort of computational chauvinists, and think that computation is everything, but the mechanics still matter. Here's another robot, the PackBot, that we've been building for a bunch of years. It's a military surveillance robot, to go in ahead of troops — looking at caves, for instance. But we had to make it fairly robust, much more robust than the robots we build in our labs. (Laughter) On board that robot is a PC running Linux. It can withstand a 400G shock. The robot has local intelligence: it can flip itself over, can get itself into communication range, can go upstairs by itself, et cetera. Okay, so it's doing local navigation there. A soldier gives it a command to go upstairs, and it does. That was not a controlled descent. (Laughter) Now it's going to head off. And the big breakthrough for these robots, really, was September 11th. We had the robots down at the World Trade Center late that evening. Couldn't do a lot in the main rubble pile, things were just too — there was nothing left to do. But we did go into all the surrounding buildings that had been evacuated, and searched for possible survivors in the buildings that were too dangerous to go into. Let's run this video. Reporter: ...battlefield companions are helping to reduce the combat risks. Nick Robertson has that story. Rodney Brooks: Can we have another one of these? Okay, good. So, this is a corporal who had seen a robot two weeks previously. He's sending robots into caves, looking at what's going on. The robot's being totally autonomous. The worst thing that's happened in the cave so far was one of the robots fell down ten meters. So one year ago, the US military didn't have these robots. Now they're on active duty in Afghanistan every day. And that's one of the reasons they say a robot invasion is happening. There's a sea change happening in how — where technology's going. Thanks. And over the next couple of months, we're going to be sending robots in production down producing oil wells to get that last few years of oil out of the ground. Very hostile environments, 150˚ C, 10,000 PSI. Autonomous robots going down, doing this sort of work. But robots like this, they're a little hard to program. How, in the future, are we going to program our robots and make them easier to use? And I want to actually use a robot here — a robot named Chris — stand up. Yeah. Okay. Come over here. Now notice, he thinks robots have to be a bit stiff. He sort of does that. But I'm going to — Chris Anderson: I'm just British. RB: Oh. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm going to show this robot a task. It's a very complex task. Now notice, he nodded there, he was giving me some indication he was understanding the flow of communication. And if I'd said something completely bizarre he would have looked askance at me, and regulated the conversation. So now I brought this up in front of him. I'd looked at his eyes, and I saw his eyes looked at this bottle top. And I'm doing this task here, and he's checking up. His eyes are going back and forth up to me, to see what I'm looking at — so we've got shared attention. And so I do this task, and he looks, and he looks to me to see what's happening next. And now I'll give him the bottle, and we'll see if he can do the task. Can you do that? (Laughter) Okay. He's pretty good. Yeah. Good, good, good. I didn't show you how to do that. Now see if you can put it back together. (Laughter) And he thinks a robot has to be really slow. Good robot, that's good. So we saw a bunch of things there. We saw when we're interacting, we're trying to show someone how to do something, we direct their visual attention. The other thing communicates their internal state to us, whether he's understanding or not, regulates a social interaction. There was shared attention looking at the same sort of thing, and recognizing socially communicated reinforcement at the end. And we've been trying to put that into our lab robots because we think this is how you're going to want to interact with robots in the future. I just want to show you one technical diagram here. The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing. So in the videos I'm about to show you, you're going to see a visual attention system on a robot which has — it looks for skin tone in HSV space, so it works across all human colorings. It looks for highly saturated colors, from toys. And it looks for things that move around. And it weights those together into an attention window, and it looks for the highest-scoring place — the stuff where the most interesting stuff is happening — and that is what its eyes then segue to. And it looks right at that. At the same time, some top-down sort of stuff: might decide that it's lonely and look for skin tone, or might decide that it's bored and look for a toy to play with. And so these weights change. And over here on the right, this is what we call the Steven Spielberg memorial module. Did people see the movie "AI"? (Audience: Yes.) RB: Yeah, it was really bad, but — remember, especially when Haley Joel Osment, the little robot, looked at the blue fairy for 2,000 years without taking his eyes off it? Well, this gets rid of that, because this is a habituation Gaussian that gets negative, and more and more intense as it looks at one thing. And it gets bored, so it will then look away at something else. So, once you've got that — and here's a robot, here's Kismet, looking around for a toy. You can tell what it's looking at. You can estimate its gaze direction from those eyeballs covering its camera, and you can tell when it's actually seeing the toy. And it's got a little bit of an emotional response here. (Laughter) But it's still going to pay attention if something more significant comes into its field of view — such as Cynthia Breazeal, the builder of this robot, from the right. It sees her, pays attention to her. Kismet has an underlying, three-dimensional emotional space, a vector space, of where it is emotionally. And at different places in that space, it expresses — can we have the volume on here? Can you hear that now, out there? (Audience: Yeah.) Kismet: Do you really think so? Do you really think so? Do you really think so? RB: So it's expressing its emotion through its face and the prosody in its voice. And when I was dealing with my robot over here, Chris, the robot, was measuring the prosody in my voice, and so we have the robot measure prosody for four basic messages that mothers give their children pre-linguistically. Here we've got naive subjects praising the robot: Voice: Nice robot. You're such a cute little robot. (Laughter) RB: And the robot's reacting appropriately. Voice: ...very good, Kismet. (Laughter) Voice: Look at my smile. RB: It smiles. She imitates the smile. This happens a lot. These are naive subjects. Here we asked them to get the robot's attention and indicate when they have the robot's attention. Voice: Hey, Kismet, ah, there it is. RB: So she realizes she has the robot's attention. Voice: Kismet, do you like the toy? Oh. RB: Now, here they're asked to prohibit the robot, and this first woman really pushes the robot into an emotional corner. Voice: No. No. You're not to do that. No. (Laughter) Not appropriate. No. No. (Laughter) RB: I'm going to leave it at that. We put that together. Then we put in turn taking. When we talk to someone, we talk. Then we sort of raise our eyebrows, move our eyes, give the other person the idea it's their turn to talk. And then they talk, and then we pass the baton back and forth between each other. So we put this in the robot. We got a bunch of naive subjects in, we didn't tell them anything about the robot, sat them down in front of the robot and said, talk to the robot. Now what they didn't know was, the robot wasn't understanding a word they said, and that the robot wasn't speaking English. It was just saying random English phonemes. And I want you to watch carefully, at the beginning of this, where this person, Ritchie, who happened to talk to the robot for 25 minutes — (Laughter) — says, "I want to show you something. I want to show you my watch." And he brings the watch center, into the robot's field of vision, points to it, gives it a motion cue, and the robot looks at the watch quite successfully. We don't know whether he understood or not that the robot — Notice the turn-taking. Ritchie: OK, I want to show you something. OK, this is a watch that my girlfriend gave me. Robot: Oh, cool. Ritchie: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. I almost lost it this week. (Laughter) RB: So it's making eye contact with him, following his eyes. Ritchie: Can you do the same thing? Robot: Yeah, sure. RB: And they successfully have that sort of communication. And here's another aspect of the sorts of things that Chris and I were doing. This is another robot, Cog. They first make eye contact, and then, when Christie looks over at this toy, the robot estimates her gaze direction and looks at the same thing that she's looking at. (Laughter) So we're going to see more and more of this sort of robot over the next few years in labs. But then the big questions, two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them, will we — will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over? (Laughter) And on the first — you know, this has been a very Hollywood theme with lots of movies. You probably recognize these characters here — where in each of these cases, the robots want more respect. Well, do you ever need to give robots respect? They're just machines, after all. But I think, you know, we have to accept that we are just machines. After all, that's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us. You don't see a description of how, you know, Molecule A, you know, comes up and docks with this other molecule. And it's moving forward, you know, propelled by various charges, and then the soul steps in and tweaks those molecules so that they connect. It's all mechanistic. We are mechanism. If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are. But I think for us to admit that, we have to give up on our special-ness, in a certain way. And we've had the retreat from special-ness under the barrage of science and technology many times over the last few hundred years, at least. 500 years ago we had to give up the idea that we are the center of the universe when the earth started to go around the sun; 150 years ago, with Darwin, we had to give up the idea we were different from animals. And to imagine — you know, it's always hard for us. Recently we've been battered with the idea that maybe we didn't even have our own creation event, here on earth, which people didn't like much. And then the human genome said, maybe we only have 35,000 genes. And that was really — people didn't like that, we've got more genes than that. We don't like to give up our special-ness, so, you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures — I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we're going to come to accept it over the next 50 years or so. And the second question is, will the machines want to take over? And here the standard scenario is that we create these things, they grow, we nurture them, they learn a lot from us, and then they start to decide that we're pretty boring, slow. They want to take over from us. And for those of you that have teenagers, you know what that's like. (Laughter) But Hollywood extends it to the robots. And the question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know — "I accidentally built a 747." I don't think that's going to happen. And I don't think — (Laughter) — I don't think we're going to deliberately build robots that we're uncomfortable with. We'll — you know, they're not going to have a super bad robot. Before that has to come to be a mildly bad robot, and before that a not so bad robot. (Laughter) And we're just not going to let it go that way. (Laughter) So, I think I'm going to leave it at that: the robots are coming, we don't have too much to worry about, it's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoy the journey over the next 50 years. (Applause)

Things I've learned in my life so far

Stefan Sagmeister

{0: 'Stefan Sagmeister'}

{0: ['graphic designer']}

{0: 'Renowned for album covers, posters and his recent book of life lessons, designer Stefan Sagmeister invariably has a slightly different way of looking at things.'}

2008-02-02

2008-09-30

TED2008

en

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

['art', 'design', 'education', 'happiness', 'humor', 'work']

{172: 'Designing for simplicity', 197: 'Design and destiny', 182: 'The illustrated woman', 50: 'Happiness by design', 649: 'The power of time off', 501: 'Can design save newspapers?'}

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

Rockstar designer Stefan Sagmeister delivers a short, witty talk on life lessons, expressed through surprising modes of design (including ... inflatable monkeys?).

I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) — but made a whole number of them into projects since. These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: "Everybody always thinks they are right." They were combined in the media. "Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on." We're doing changing media. This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. All of these things are pieces of graphic design. We do them for our clients. They are commissioned. I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. "Worrying solves nothing." "Money does not make me happy" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. When the magazine — actually, when I got the subscription — it was 12 following pages. It said, "Money does does make me happy." And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. It just says "Money," and if you look down the side street, it says, "does not make me happy." We had a show that just came down last week in New York. We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window. Everybody participated — Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. Singapore was quite in discussion. This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. And, of course, it's one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments — some banal, some a bit more profound — all originally had come out of my diary. And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. If it's — see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. And the very last one is a billboard. This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. We let that lie around in the sun. As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, "Complaining is silly. Either act or forget." Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. (Laughter) Thank you so much. (Applause)

Politics and religion are technologies

Noah Feldman

{0: 'Noah Feldman'}

{0: ['constitutional law scholar']}

{0: 'Noah Feldman studies the intersection of religion, politics and law.'}

2003-02-02

2008-10-01

TED2003

en

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

['culture', 'democracy', 'global issues', 'politics', 'religion', 'social change', 'society', 'war']

{234: 'My wish: The Charter for Compassion', 116: 'Dangerous memes', 19: 'How technology evolves', 1189: 'A global culture to fight extremism', 1155: 'Faith versus tradition in Islam', 1595: 'Why democracy matters'}

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

Noah Feldman makes a searing case that both politics and religion -- whatever their differences -- are similar technologies, designed to efficiently connect and manage any group of people.

I want to argue to you that in fact, politics and religion, which are the two primary factors — not the sole, but overwhelmingly, the primary factors — which are driving towards a war which looks extremely likely — bordering on the inevitable at this point, whether one is in favor of that or not — that politics and religion are, in fact, themselves better conceptualized as kinds of technology, and subject to kinds of questions that we regularly consider in the space of conceptual design. Here's what I mean. Politics and — let's focus on the political system in particular question here, which is the system of democracy. Democracy, as a type of politics, is a technology for the control and deployment of power. You can deploy power in a wide range of ways. The famous ones — despotism is a good one; anarchy is a way to not deploy the power in any organized way, to do it in a radically diffused fashion; and democracy is a set of technologies, which have the effect of, in principle, diffusing the power source to a large number of people and then re-concentrating it in a smaller group of people who govern, and who themselves are, in principle, authorized to govern by virtue of what the broader public has done. Now, consider religion — in this case Islam, which is the religion that, in some direct sense, can be said to be precipitating what we're about to enter. Let me say parenthetically why I think that's the case, because I think it's a potentially controversial statement. I would put it in the following equation: no 9/11, no war. At the beginning of the Bush administration, when President Bush, now President Bush, was running for president, he made it very clear that he was not interested in intervening broadly in the world. In fact, the trend was for disengagement with the rest of the world. That's why we heard about the backing away from the Kyoto protocol, for example. After 9/11, the tables were turned. And the president decided, with his advisors, to undertake some kind of an active intervention in the world around us. That began with Afghanistan, and when Afghanistan went extremely smoothly and quickly, a decision was made through the technology of democracy — again, notice, not a perfect technology — but through the technology of democracy that this administration was going to push in the direction of another war — this time, a war in Iraq. Now, the reason I begin by saying "no 9/11, no war" is that we have to acknowledge that Islam, as interpreted by a very, very small, extremely radical group of people, was a precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks — the precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks — and as a consequence, at one degree of remove, the precipitating cause of the coming war that we're about to be engaged in. And I would add that bin Laden and his followers are consciously devoted to the goal of creating a conflict between democracy, or at least capitalist democracy, on the one hand, and the world of Islam as they see and define it. Now, how is Islam a technology in this conceptual apparatus? Well, it's a technology for, first, salvation in its most basic sense. It's meant to be a mechanism for construing the universe in a way that will bring about the salvation of the individual believer, but it's also meant by the Islamists — and I use that term to mean people who believe that Islam — they follow the slogan, Islam is the answer to a wide range of questions, whether they're social, or political, or personal, or spiritual. Within the sphere of people who have that view, and it's a large number of people in the Muslim world who disagree with bin Laden in his application, but agree that Islam is the answer. Islam represents a way of engaging the world through which one can achieve certain desirable goals. And the goals from the perspective of Muslims are, in principle, peace, justice and equality, but on terms that correspond to traditional Muslim teachings. Now, I don't want to leave a misimpression by identifying either of these propositions — rather, either of these phenomena, democracy or Islam — as technologies. I don't want to suggest that they are a single thing that you can point to. And I think a good way to prove this is simply to demonstrate to you what my thought process was when deciding what to put on the wall behind me when I spoke. And I ran immediately into a conceptual problem: you can't show a picture of democracy. You can show a slogan, or a symbol, or a sign that stands for democracy. You can show the Capitol — I had the same problem when I was designing the cover of my forthcoming book, in fact — what do you put on the cover to show democracy? And the same problem with respect to Islam. You can show a mosque, or you can show worshippers, but there's not a straightforward way of depicting Islam. That's because these are the kinds of concepts that are not susceptible to easy representation. Now, it follows from that, that they're deeply contestable. It follows from that that all of the people in the world who say that they are Muslims can, in principle, subscribe to a wide range of different interpretations of what Islam really is, and the same is true of democracy. In other words, unlike the word hope, which one could look up in a dictionary and derive origins for, and, perhaps, reach some kind of a consensual use analysis, these are essentially contested concepts. They're ideas about which people disagree in the deepest possible sense. And as a consequence of this disagreement, it's very, very difficult for anyone to say, "I have the right version of Islam." You know, post-9/11, we were treated to the amazing phenomenon of George W. Bush saying, "Islam means peace." Well, so says George W. Bush. Other people would say it means something else. Some people would say that Islam means submission. Other people would say it means an acknowledgement or recognition of God's sovereignty. There are a wide range of different things that Islam can mean. And ostensibly, the same is true of democracy. Some people say that democracy consists basically in elections. Other people say no, that's not enough, there have to be basic liberal rights: free speech, free press, equality of citizens. These are contested points, and it's impossible to answer them by saying, "Ah ha, I looked in the right place, and I found out what these concepts mean." Now, if Islam and democracy are at present in a moment of great confrontation, what does that mean? Well, you could fit it into a range of different interpretative frameworks. You could begin with the one that we began with a couple of days ago, which was fear. Fear is not an implausible reaction with a war just around the corner and with a very, very high likelihood that many, many people are going to die as a consequence of this confrontation — a confrontation which many, many people in the Muslim world do not want, many, many people in the American democracy do not want, many people elsewhere in the world do not want, but which nonetheless is favored by a large enough number of people — at least in the relevant space, which is the United States — to actually go forward. So fear is not a crazy response at all. And I think that that's, in fact, probably the first appropriate response. What I want to suggest to you, though, in the next couple of minutes is that there's also a hopeful response to this. And the hopeful response derives from recognizing that Islam and democracy are technologies. And by virtue of being technologies, they're manipulable. And they're manipulable in ways that can produce some extremely positive outcomes. What do I have in mind? Well, all over the Muslim world there are people who take Islam deeply seriously, people who care about Islam, for whom it's a source either of faith, or of civilization, or of deep values, or just a source of powerful personal identity, who think and are saying loudly that Islam and democracy are in fact not in conflict, but are in fact deeply compatible. And these Muslims — and it's the vast majority of Muslims — disagree profoundly with bin Laden's approach, profoundly. And they furthermore think overwhelmingly — again one can't speak of every person, but overwhelmingly, and one can find this by reading any of the sources that they have produced, and they're all over the Internet and in all sorts of languages — one can see that they're saying that their concern in their own countries is primarily to free up themselves to have choice in the spheres of personal life, in the sphere of economics, in the sphere of politics, and, yes, in the sphere of religion, which is itself closely regulated in most of the Muslim world. And many of these Muslims further say that their disagreement with the United States is that it, in the past and still in the present, has sided with autocratic rulers in the Muslim world in order to promote America's short-term interests. Now, during the Cold War, that may have been a defensible position for the United States to take. That's an academic question. It may be that there was a great war to be fought between West and East, and it was necessary on the axis of democracy against communism. And it was necessary in some way for these to contradict each other, and as a consequence you have to make friends wherever you can get them. But now that the Cold War is over, there's nearly universal consensus in the Muslim world — and pretty close to the same here in the United States, if you talk to people and ask them — that in principle, there's no reason that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. And we see this among activist, practical Muslims, like the Muslims who are presently the elected, parliamentary, democratic government of Turkey, who are behaving pragmatically, not ideologically, who are promoting their own religious values, who are elected by their own people because they were perceived as honest and sincere because of their religious values, but who do not think that Islam and a democratic system of governance are fundamentally incompatible. Now, you may say, but surely, what we've seen on television about Saudi Islam convinces us that it can't possibly be compatible with what we consider the core of democracy — namely, free political choice, basic liberty and basic equality. But I'm here to tell you that technologies are more malleable than that. I'm here to tell you that many, many Muslims believe — the vast majority, in fact — in fact I think I would go so far as to say that many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice. And there are Muslims, many Muslims out there, who are saying precisely this. And they're making this argument wherever they're permitted to make it. But their governments, needless to say, are relatively threatened by this. And for the most part try to stop them from making this argument. So, for example, a group of young activists in Egypt try to form a party known as the Center Party, which advocated the compatibility of Islam and democracy. They weren't even allowed to form a party. They were actually blocked from even forming a party under the political system there. Why? Because they would have done extraordinarily well. In the most recent elections in the Muslim world — which are those in Pakistan, those in Morocco and those in Turkey — in each case, people who present themselves to the electorate as Islamic democrats were far and away the most successful vote-getters every place they were allowed to run freely. So in Morocco, for example, they finished third in the political race but they were only allowed to contest half the seats. So had they contested a larger number of the seats, they would have done even better. Now what I want to suggest to you is that the reason for hope in this case is that we are on the edge of a real transformation in the Muslim world. And that's a transformation in which many sincerely believing Muslims — who care very, very deeply about their traditions, who do not want to compromise those values — believe, through the malleability of the technology of democracy and the malleability and synthetic capability of the technology of Islam, that these two ideas can work together. Now what would that look like? What does it mean to say that there's an Islamic democracy? Well, one thing is, it's not going to look identical to democracy as we know it in the United States. That may be a good thing, in light of some of the criticisms we've heard today — for example, in the regulatory context — of what democracy produces. It will also not look exactly the way either the people in this room, or Muslims out in the rest of the world — I don't mean to imply there aren't Muslims here, there probably are — conceptualize Islam. It will be transformative of Islam as well. And as a result of this convergence, this synthetic attempt to make sense of these two ideas together, there's a real possibility that, instead of a clash of Islamic civilization — if there is such a thing — and democratic civilization — if there is such a thing — we'll in fact have close compatibility. Now, I began with the war because it's the elephant in the room, and you can't pretend that there isn't about to be a war if you're talking about these issues. The war has tremendous risks for the model that I'm describing because it's very possible that as a consequence of a war, many Muslims will conclude that the United States is not the kind of place that they want to emulate with respect to its forms of political government. On the other hand, there's a further possibility that many Americans, swept up in the fever of a war, will say, and feel, and think that Islam is the enemy somehow — that Islam ought to be construed as the enemy. And even though, for political tactical reasons, the president has been very, very good about saying that Islam is not the enemy, nonetheless, there's a natural impulse when one enters war to think of the other side as an enemy. And one furthermore has the impulse to generalize, as much as possible, in defining who that enemy is. So the risks are very great. On the other hand, the capacities for positive results in the aftermath of a war are also not to be underestimated, even by, and I would say especially by, people who are deeply skeptical about whether we should go to war in the first place. Those who oppose the war ought to realize that if a war happens, it cannot be the right strategy, either pragmatically, or spiritually, or morally, to say after the war, "Well, let's let it all run itself out, and play out however it wants to play out, because we opposed the war in the first place." That's not the way human circumstances operate. You face the circumstances you have in front of you and you go forward. Well, what I'm here to say then is, for people who are skeptical about the war, it's especially important to recognize that in the aftermath of the war there is a possibility for the government of the United States and the Muslim peoples with whom it interacts to create real forms of government that are truly democratic and also truly Islamic. And it is crucial — it is crucial in a practical, activist way — for people who care about these issues to make sure that within the technology of democracy, in this system, they exercise their preferences, their choices and their voices to encourage that outcome. That's a hopeful message, but it's a message that's hopeful only if you understand it as incurring serious obligation for all of us. And I think that we are capable of taking on that obligation, but only if we put what we can into it. And if we do, then I don't think that the hope will be unwarranted altogether. Thanks.

The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture

Liz Diller

{0: 'Liz Diller'}

{0: ['designer']}

{0: 'Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice.'}

2007-12-12

2008-10-02

EG 2007

en

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

['architecture', 'art', 'cities', 'design', 'theater', 'Best of the Web']

{49: "Behind the design of Seattle's library", 31: 'How architecture can connect us', 219: 'Building uniqueness', 750: 'Building a theater that remakes itself', 231: 'My days as a young rebel', 1147: 'Building the Seed Cathedral'}

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

In this engrossing EG talk, architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R's more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.

Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses. Our work is across media. The work comes in all shapes and sizes. It's small and large. This is an ashtray, a water glass. From urban planning and master planning to theater and all sorts of stuff. The thing that all the work has in common is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space. And these are everyday conventions, conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity. And I've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect. And that is something like nothing, or something next to nothing. It's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through. This is an image that won us a competition for an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near Geneva. And we wanted to use the water not only as a context, but as a primary building material. We wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere. So, no walls, no roof, no purpose — just a mass of atomized water, a big cloud. And this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions, which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity. High definition, in our opinion, has become the new orthodoxy. And we ask the question, can we use technology, high technology, to make an expo pavilion that's decidedly low definition, that also challenges the conventions of space and skin, and rethinks our dependence on vision? So this is how we sought to do it. Water's pumped from the lake and is filtered and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles, 35,000 of them. And a weather station is on the structure. It reads the shifting conditions of temperature, humidity, wind direction, wind speed, dew point, and it processes this data in a central computer that calibrates the degree of water pressure and distribution of water throughout. And it's a responsive system that's trained on actual weather. So, this is just in construction, and there's a tensegrity structure. It's about 300 feet wide, the size of a football field, and it sits on just four very delicate columns. These are the fog nozzles, the interface, and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather, and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather. So, we're very interested in creating weather. I don't know why. Now, here we go, one side, the outside and then from the inside of the space you can see what the quality of the space was. Unlike entering any normal space, entering Blur is like stepping into a habitable medium. It's formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, purposeless and dimensionless. All references are erased, leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles. So, this is an exhibition pavilion where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do. And we pride ourselves — it's a spectacular anti-spectacle in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head. So, the audience is dispersed, focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention that's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog. And this is very much like how the Victorian novel used fog in this way. So here the world is put out of focus, while our visual dependence is put into focus. The public, you know, once disoriented can actually ascend to the angel deck above and then just come down under those lips into the water bar. So, all the waters of the world are served there, so we thought that, you know, after being at the water and moving through the water and breathing the water, you could also drink this building. And so it is sort of a theme, but it goes a little bit, you know, deeper than that. We really wanted to bring out our absolute dependence on this master sense, and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses. You know, when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell, because the Swiss said, "Well, why are we going to spend, you know, 10 million dollars producing an effect that we already have in natural abundance that we hate?" And, you know, we thought — well, we tried to convince them. And in the end, you know, they adapted this as a national icon that came to represent Swiss doubt, which we — you know, it was kind of a meaning machine that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of. Anyway, it's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed, and so it's now a memory of an apparition, actually, but it continues to live in edible form. And this is the highest honor to be bestowed upon an architect in Switzerland — to have a chocolate bar. Anyway, moving along. So in the '80s and '90s, we were mostly known for independent work, such as installation artist, architect, commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations. And we did a lot of media work, also a lot of experimental theater projects. In 2003, the Whitney mounted a retrospective of our work that featured a lot of this work from the '80s and '90s. However, the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective, and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show. This was a piece on tourism in the United States. This is "Soft Sell" for 42nd Street. This was something done at the Cartier Foundation. "Master/Slave" at the MOMA, the project series, a piece called "Parasite." And so there were many, many of these kinds of projects. Anyway, they gave us the whole fourth floor, and, you know, the problem of the retrospective was something we were very uncomfortable with. It's a kind of invention of the museum that's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding to the public of a body of work. And our work doesn't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all. And one of the recurring themes, by the way, that in the work was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself, and asking about the conventions of the museum, like the wall, the white wall. So, what you see here is basically a plan of many installations that were put there. And we actually had to install white walls to separate these pieces, which didn't belong together. But these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time. We used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation. And what you see is — actually, the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element, which was a new piece that created — that we created for the — which was a robotic drill, basically, that went all the way around, cruised the museum, went all around the walls and did a lot of damage. So, the drill was mounted on this robotic arm. We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain. Honeybee Robotics designed the Mars Driller, and it was really very much fun to work with them. They weren't doing their primary work, which was for the government, while they were helping us with this. In any case, the way it works is that an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls. So, unfolded it's about 300 linear feet. And it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix. It selects a point, it guides the drill to that point, it pierces the dry wall, leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location. Initially these holes were lone blemishes, and as the exhibition continued the walls became increasingly perforated. So eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned, opening views from gallery to gallery. Clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall. And so this was a three-month performance piece in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element. And also the acoustic separation was destroyed. Also the visual separation. And there was also this constant background groan, which was very annoying. And this is one of the blackout spaces where there's a video piece that became totally not useful. So rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display, the wall now actively competed for attention. And this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance basically exposed the discomfort of the work to this encompassing nature of the retrospective. It was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text. Moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago. It's the ICA — the Institute of Contemporary Art — in Boston, which is on the waterfront. And there's not enough time to really introduce the building, but I'll simply say that the building negotiates between this outwardly focused nature of the site — you know, it's a really great waterfront site in Boston — and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum. So, the nature of the building is that it looks at looking — I mean that's its primary objective, both its program and its architectural conceit. The building incorporates the site, but it dispenses it in very small doses in the way that the museum is choreographed. So, you come in and you're basically squeezed by the theater, by the belly of the theater, into this very compressed space where the view is turned off. Then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall. This elevator's about the size of a New York City studio apartment. And then, this is a view going up, and then you could come into the theater, which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop. And many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open. The view is denied in the galleries where we receive just natural light, and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view. The original intention of this space, which was unfortunately never realized, was to use lenticular glass which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out. In this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries the intention was really to not get a climax, but to have the view stalk you, so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other. This was eliminated because the view was too good, and the mayor said, "No, we just want this open." The architect lost here. But culminating — and that's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk — is this Mediatheque, which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building. So this is an 80-foot cantilever — it's quite substantial. So, it's already sticking out into space enough, and then from that is this, is this small area called the Mediatheque. The Mediatheque has something like 16 stations where the public can get onto the server and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web. And this was really a kind of very important part of this building, and here is a point where architecture — this is like technology-free — architecture is only a framing device, it only edits the harbor view, the industrial harbor just through its walls, its floors and its ceiling, to only expose the water itself, the texture of water, much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow or a lava lamp or something like that. And here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence of the technological and the natural in the project. But there is just no information, it's just — it's just hypnosis. Moving along to Lincoln Center. These are the guys that did the project in the first place, 50 years ago. We're taking over now, doing work that ranges in scale from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions. But we're doing it with a lot less testosterone. This is the extent of the work that's to be completed by 2010. And for the purposes of this talk, I wanted to isolate just a part of a project that's even a part of a project that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects, and it happens to be our current obsession, and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction. It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building and descends several levels under the street. So, this is the entrance to Tully Hall as it used to be, before the renovation, which we just started. And we asked ourselves, why couldn't it be exhibitionistic, like the Met, or like some of the other buildings at Lincoln Center? And one of the things that we were asked to do was give it a street identity, expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible. And this building, which is just naturally hermetic, we stripped. We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease, where we're framing with this kind of canopy — the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard, about 45,000 square feet — cutting it to the angle of Broadway, and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall. Before and after shot. (Applause) Wait a minute, it's just in that state, we have a long way to go. But what I wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that I have left to just talk about the hall itself, which is kind of where we're really doing a massive amount of work. So, the hall is a multi-purpose hall. The clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall. Now, that's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats. Chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons and small-scale performances. They asked us to bring an intimacy. How do you bring an intimacy into a hall? Intimacy for us means a lot of different things. It means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy. One thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall. Another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall. It's like a coffin, it basically sends all the sound, like a gutter-ball effect, down the aisles. The walls are made of absorptive surface, half absorptive, half reflective, which is not very good for concert sound. This is Avery Fisher Hall, but the notion of junk — visual junk — was very, very important to us, to get rid of visual noise. Because we can't eliminate a single seat, the architecture is restricted to 18 inches. So it's a very, very thin architecture. First we do a kind of partial box and box separation, to take away the distraction of the subway noise. Next we wrap the entire hall — almost like this Olivetti keyboard — with a material, with a wood material that basically covers all the surfaces: wall, ceiling, floor, stage, steps, everything, boxes. But it's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house and back to the stage. And here's an acoustic shelf. Looking up the hall. Just a section of the stage. Just everything is lined, it incorporates — every single thing that you could possibly imagine is tucked into this high-performance skin. But one more added feature. So now that we've stripped the hall of all visual distraction, everything that prevents this intimacy which is supposed to connect the house, the audience, with the performers, we add one little detail, one piece of architectural excess, a special effect: lighting. We very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival as it is when the concert starts. So what we wanted to do was produce this effect, this lighting effect, which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls. And what it entails is the use of resin, of this very thick resin with a veneer of the same kind of wood that's used throughout the hall, in a kind of seamless continuity that wraps the hall in light, like a belt of light: rather than separating, like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers, it connects audience with players. And this is a mockup that is in Salt Lake City that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale. And this is a guy from Salt Lake City, this is what they look like out there. (Laughter) And for us, I mean it's really kind of a very strange thing, but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin, very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier, the walls will just exude this glow, temporarily stealing attention from the stage. And this is Tully in construction now. I have no ending to say, except that I'm a couple of minutes over. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Moving photos of extreme drug-resistant TB

James Nachtwey

{0: 'James Nachtwey'}

{0: ['photojournalist']}

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

2008-10-03

2008-10-03

TED Prize Wish

en

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

['TED Prize', 'communication', 'design', 'media', 'photography', 'technology', 'art']

{84: 'My wish: Let my photographs bear witness', 381: 'The face of AIDS in Africa', 171: 'An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers', 44879: "What makes TB the world's most infectious killer?", 826: 'Photos that changed the world', 324: 'How photography connects us'}

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

An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form. James Nachtwey share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB, a newly drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that has developed due to misused and inadequate medical treatments -- and that might be touching off a global medical crisis.

I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and — on a personal level — an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging, the Civil Rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another. I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history — they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable. It puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. My TED wish. There’s a vital story that needs to be told and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. Thank you very much. [ 10.3.08 — The story breaks. ] [ "I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony." ] [ South Africa ] [ This is happening now. ] [ Cambodia ] [ Swaziland ] [ One person dies every 20 seconds. ] [ Thailand ] [ An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form. ] [ Siberia ] [ Lesotho ] [ Tuberculosis: the next pandemic? ] [ India ] [ TB is preventable and curable, ] [ but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment. ] [ XDR-TB: ] [ extreme drug resistant tuberculosis. ] [ There is no reliable cure. ] [ Patients often die within weeks of diagnosis. ] [ 49 countries have reported XDR-TB. ] [ XDR-TB is a critical threat to global health. ] [ Extreme outbreak, suffering, affliction ] [ Extreme loss, pain, pandemic ] [ Extremely preventable. ] [ XDR-TB. ] [ We can stop this now. ] [ Spread the story. Stop the disease. ] [ Go to XDRTB.org now. ] [ XDRTB.org: we are the treatment. ] [ We are the treatment. ] [ Made possible through the kind support of BD. ]