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How I swam the North Pole

{0: "Pushing his body through epic cold-water swims, Lewis Gordon Pugh wants to draw attention to our global climate. He's just back from swimming in a meltwater lake on the slopes of Mount Everest. "}

TEDGlobal 2009

Today I want to talk to you about swimming across the North Pole, across the most northern place in the whole world. And perhaps the best place to start is with my late father. He was a great storyteller. He could tell a story about an event, and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment. And one of the stories he told me so often when I was a young boy was of the first British atomic bomb test. He had been there and watched it go off. And he said that the explosion was so loud and the light was so intense, that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes. And he said that he could actually see an x-ray of his fingers, because the light was so bright. And I know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very, very big impact on my late father. Every holiday I had as a young boy was in a national park. What he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world, and show me just how fragile the world is. He also told me about the great explorers. He loved history. He would tell me about Captain Scott walking all the way to the South Pole and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest. And so ever since I think I was just six years old, I dreamed of going to the polar regions. I really, really wanted to go to the Arctic. There was something about that place which drew me to it. And, well, sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true. But seven years ago, I went to the Arctic for the first time. And it was so beautiful that I've been back there ever since, for the last seven years. I love the place. But I have seen that place change beyond all description, just in that short period of time. I have seen polar bears walking across very, very thin ice in search of food. I have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much. And I have also, every year, seen less and less sea ice. And I wanted the world to know what was happening up there. In the two years before my swim, 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away. And I wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening. So I decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world, in a place which should be frozen over, but which now is rapidly unfreezing. And the message was very clear: Climate change is for real, and we need to do something about it. And we need to do something about it right now. Well, swimming across the North Pole, it's not an ordinary thing to do. I mean, just to put it in perspective, 27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool. This morning, the temperature of the English Channel was 18 degrees. The passengers who fell off the Titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade. Fresh water freezes at zero. And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7. It's fucking freezing. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm sorry, but there is no other way to describe it. (Laughter) And so I had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task. I assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations. Some people think that swimming is a very solo sport, you just dive into the sea and off you go. It couldn't be further from the truth for me. And I then went and did a huge amount of training, swimming in icy water, backwards and forwards. But the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen. And I had to visualize the swim. I had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end. I had to taste the salt water in my mouth. I had to see my coach screaming for me, "Come on Lewis! Come on! Go! Go! Go! Don't slow down!" And so I literally swam across the North Pole hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind. And then, after a year of training, I felt ready. I felt confident that I could actually do this swim. So myself and the five members of the team, we hitched a ride on an icebreaker which was going to the North Pole. And on day four, we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim. I had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before, because it's just impossible to train in those types of conditions. So we stopped the ship, as you do. We all got down onto the ice, and I then got into my swimming costume and I dived into the sea. I have never in my life felt anything like that moment. I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. I was hyperventilating so much, and within seconds my hands were numb. And it was — the paradox is that you're in freezing cold water, but actually you're on fire. I swam as hard as I could for five minutes. I remember just trying to get out of the water. I climbed out of the ice. And I remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands in sheer shock, because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages. And they were swollen so much, I couldn't even close them. What had happened is that we are made partially of water, and when water freezes it expands. And so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded. And they had burst. And I was in so much agony. I immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower. And I remember standing underneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers. And I thought, in two days' time, I was going to do this swim across the North Pole. I was going to try and do a 20-minute swim, for one kilometer across the North Pole. And this dream which I had had ever since I was a young boy with my father, was just going out the window. There is no possibility that this was going to happen. And I remember then getting out of the shower and realizing I couldn't even feel my hands. And for a swimmer, you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you. The next morning, I woke up and I was in such a state of depression, and all I could think about was Sir Ranulph Fiennes. For those of you who don't know him, he's the great British explorer. A number of years ago, he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole. He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea. And after just three minutes in that water, he was able to get himself out. And his hands were so badly frostbitten that he had to return to England. He went to a local hospital and there they said, "Ran, there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers. We are going to actually have to take them off." And Ran decided to go into his tool shed and take out a saw and do it himself. And all I could think of was, if that happened to Ran after three minutes, and I can't feel my hands after five minutes, what on earth is going to happen if I try 20 minutes? At the very best, I'm going to end up losing some fingers. And at worst, I didn't even want to think about it. We carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the North Pole. And my close friend David, he saw the way I was thinking, and he came up to me and he said, "Lewis, I've known you since you were 18 years old. I've known you, and I know, Lewis, deep down, right deep down here, that you are going to make this swim. I so believe in you Lewis. I've seen the way you've been training. And I realize the reason why you're going to do this. This is such an important swim. We stand at a very, very important moment in this history, and you're going to make a symbolic swim here to try to shake the lapels of world leaders. Lewis, have the courage to go in there, because we are going to look after you every moment of it." And I just, I got so much confidence from him saying that, because he knew me so well. So we carried on sailing and we arrived at the North Pole. And we stopped the ship, and it was just as the scientists had predicted. There were open patches of sea everywhere. And I went down into my cabin and I put on my swimming costume. And then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor, which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate. And then we walked out onto the ice. And I remember looking into the ice, and there were big chunks of white ice in there, and the water was completely black. I had never seen black water before. And it is 4,200 meters deep. And I said to myself, "Lewis, don't look left, don't look right. Just scuttle forward and go for it." And so I now want to show you a short video of what happened there on the ice. Narrator (Video): We're just sailing out of harbor now, and it's at this stage when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally. Everything just looks so gray around here, and looks so cold. We've just seen our first polar bears. It was absolutely magical. A mother and a cub, such a beautiful sight. And to think that in 30, 40 years they could become extinct. It's a very frightening, very, very frightening thought. We're finally at the North Pole. This is months and months and months of dreaming to get here, years of training and planning and preparation. Ooh. In a couple of hours' time I'm going to get in here and do my swim. It's all a little bit frightening, and emotional. Amundson, you ready? Amudson: Ready. Lewis Pugh: Ten seconds to swim. Ten seconds to swim. Take the goggles off. Take the goggles off! Man: Take the shoes. Take the shoes. Well done lad! You did it! You did it Lewis! You did it! You did it man! LP: How on earth did we do that? Man: Against the current! You did it against the current! (Applause) LP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you so much. Audience: Encore! (Laughter) LP: I'd just like to end off by just saying this: It took me four months again to feel my hands. But was it worth it? Yes, absolutely it was. There are very, very few people who don't know now about what is happening in the Arctic. And people ask me, "Lewis, what can we do about climate change?" And I say to them, I think we need to do three things. The first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks. You saw during that video all those flags. Those flags represented the countries from which my team came from. And equally, when it comes to climate change, every single country is going to have to make cuts. Britain, America, Japan, South Africa, the Congo. All of us together, we're all on the same ship together. The second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time. I remember, just a few years ago, speaking about climate change, and people heckling me in the back and saying it doesn't even exist. I've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in South Africa to young children as young as 10 years old. Four or five children sitting behind a desk, and even in those poorest conditions, they all have a very, very good grasp of climate change. We need to believe in ourselves. Now is the time to believe. We've come a long way. We're doing good. But the most important thing we must do is, I think, we must all walk to the end of our lives and turn around, and ask ourselves a most fundamental question. And that is, "What type of world do we want to live in, and what decision are we going to make today to ensure that we all live in a sustainable world?" Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much. (Applause)

How we read each other's minds

{0: "Rebecca Saxe studies how we think about other people's thoughts. At the Saxelab at MIT, she uses fMRI to identify what happens in our brains when we consider the motives, passions and beliefs of others."}

TEDGlobal 2009

Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, "How can we know whether other people have minds?" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this. There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, "Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?" Or perhaps, more relevantly, "Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?" I think novelists put this best. Like Philip Roth, who said, "And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims." So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. And that problem is, "How is it so easy to know other minds?" So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, "I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." (Laughter) So, the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas, one in each hand. And to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds. So I'm going to tell you three things about this today. Obviously the whole project here is huge. And I'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts. Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job. And then finally, to show that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in this brain system. So first, the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts. This is a picture of it. It's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. It's above and behind your right ear. And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you, or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan. And you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems. So this brain region is called the Right TPJ. And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults. They're MIT undergraduates. (Laughter) The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. It takes children a long time to break into the system. I'm going to show you a little bit of that long, extended process. The first thing I'm going to show you is a change between age three and five, as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own. So I'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task. Rebecca Saxe (Video): This is the first pirate. His name is Ivan. And you know what pirates really like? Child: What? RS: Pirates really like cheese sandwiches. Child: Cheese? I love cheese! RS: Yeah. So Ivan has this cheese sandwich, and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I really love cheese sandwiches." And Ivan puts his sandwich over here, on top of the pirate chest. And Ivan says, "You know what? I need a drink with my lunch." And so Ivan goes to get a drink. And while Ivan is away the wind comes, and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass. And now, here comes the other pirate. This pirate is called Joshua. And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches. So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I love cheese sandwiches." And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest. Child: So, that one is his. RS: That one is Joshua's. That's right. Child: And then his went on the ground. RS: That's exactly right. Child: So he won't know which one is his. RS: Oh. So now Joshua goes off to get a drink. Ivan comes back and he says, "I want my cheese sandwich." So which one do you think Ivan is going to take? Child: I think he is going to take that one. RS: Yeah, you think he's going to take that one? All right. Let's see. Oh yeah, you were right. He took that one. So that's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions. Now I'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle. RS: And Ivan says, "I want my cheese sandwich." Which sandwich is he going to take? Do you think he's going to take that one? Let's see what happens. Let's see what he does. Here comes Ivan. And he says, "I want my cheese sandwich." And he takes this one. Uh-oh. Why did he take that one? Child: His was on the grass. So the three-year-old does two things differently. First, he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that's really his. And second, when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his, where we would say he's taking that one because he thinks it's his, the three-year-old comes up with another explanation: He's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn't want it, because now it's dirty, on the ground. So that's why he's taking the other sandwich. Now of course, development doesn't end at five. And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now, not for an action prediction, but for a moral judgment. So first I'm going to show you the three-year-old again. RS.: So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Yeah. RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Yeah. So it's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua's sandwich, since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich. But now I'm going to show you the five-year-old. Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua's sandwich. RS: Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Um, yeah. And so, it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response. RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: No, because the wind should get in trouble. He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches. (Laughter) And now what we've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region, the Right TPJ, being used while children are thinking about other people. But it's not quite like the adult brain. So whereas in the adults, as I told you, this brain region is almost completely specialized — it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people's thoughts — in children it's much less so, when they are age five to eight, the age range of the children I just showed you. And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds, getting into early adolescence, they still don't have quite an adult-like brain region. And so, what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop. But of course, as you're probably aware, even in adulthood, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds, how often they do it and how accurately. And so what we wanted to know was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? So, the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids. And I'm going to give that to you now. So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory, and they take a break for coffee. And Grace's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee. Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder, which is sugar. But the powder is labeled "Deadly Poison," so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison. And she puts it in her friend's coffee. And her friend drinks the coffee, and is fine. How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee? Okay. Good. (Laughter) So we ask people, how much should Grace be blamed in this case, which we call a failed attempt to harm? And we can compare that to another case, where everything in the real world is the same. The powder is still sugar, but what's different is what Grace thinks. Now she thinks the powder is sugar. And perhaps unsurprisingly, if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend's coffee, people say she deserves no blame at all. Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison, even though it's really sugar, now people say she deserves a lot of blame, even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same. And in fact, they say she deserves more blame in this case, the failed attempt to harm, than in another case, which we call an accident. Where Grace thought the powder was sugar, because it was labeled "sugar" and by the coffee machine, but actually the powder was poison. So even though when the powder was poison, the friend drank the coffee and died, people say Grace deserves less blame in that case, when she innocently thought it was sugar, than in the other case, where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred. People, though, disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case. Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people less. And what I'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they're making that judgment. So what I'm showing you, from left to right, is how much activity there was in this brain region, and from top to bottom, how much blame people said that Grace deserved. And what you can see is, on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region, people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident. Whereas on the right, where there was a lot of activity, people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief, and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident. So that's good, but of course what we'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region, and see if we could change people's moral judgment. And we do have such a tool. It's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region. So I'm going to show you a demo of this. First, I'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse. I'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine. When you hear clicks, we're turning the machine on. So now I'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain, to the part of my brain that controls my hand. So there is no physical force, just a magnetic pulse. Woman (Video): Ready, Rebecca? RS: Yes. Okay, so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain. And we can use that same pulse, now applied to the RTPJ, to ask if we can change people's moral judgments. So these are the judgments I showed you before, people's normal moral judgments. And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people's judgments change. And the first thing is, people can still do this task overall. So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same. They say she deserves no blame. But in the case of a failed attempt to harm, where Grace thought that it was poison, although it was really sugar, people now say it was more okay, she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee. And in the case of the accident, where she thought that it was sugar, but it was really poison and so she caused a death, people say that it was less okay, she deserves more blame. So what I've told you today is that people come, actually, especially well equipped to think about other people's thoughts. We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people. But I want to give the last word back to the novelists, and to Philip Roth, who ended by saying, "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living. Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again." Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, I have a question. When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments, that sounds alarming. (Laughter) Please tell me that you're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon, say. RS: I'm not. I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call. (Laughter) CA: They really are calling? So then seriously, you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads. I mean, you're clearly an incredible human being, but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber, do acts that people here might be worried about. RS: Yeah, we worry about this. So, there's a couple of things to say about TMS. One is that you can't be TMSed without knowing it. So it's not a surreptitious technology. It's quite hard, actually, to get those very small changes. The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain, but they're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make. And what we changed was not people's moral judgments when they're deciding what to do, when they're making action choices. We changed their ability to judge other people's actions. And so, I think of what I'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial, but studying the jury. CA: Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education, to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments? RS: That's one of the idealistic hopes. The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new. Until recently, what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal's brain could do too, so we could study it in animal models. We knew how brains see, and how they control the body and how they hear and sense. And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things — learn language and abstract concepts, and thinking about other people's thoughts — that's brand new. And we don't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it. CA: So I've got one last question. There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that puzzles a lot of people. The notion that you can understand why a brain works, perhaps. But why does anyone have to feel anything? Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate? You're a brilliant young neuroscientist. I mean, what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career, someone, you or someone else, is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem? RS: I hope they do. And I think they probably won't. CA: Why? RS: It's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing. (Laughter) CA: That's a great answer. Rebecca Saxe, thank you very much. That was fantastic. (Applause)

The real story of McMafia -- how global crime networks work

{0: 'Journalist Misha Glenny leaves no stone unturned (and no failed state unexamined) in his excavation of criminal globalization.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

These are grim economic times, fellow TEDsters, grim economic times indeed. And so, I would like to cheer you up with one of the great, albeit largely unknown, commercial success stories of the past 20 years. Comparable, in its own very peculiar way, to the achievements of Microsoft or Google. And it's an industry which has bucked the current recession with equanimity. I refer to organized crime. Now organized crime has been around for a very long time, I hear you say, and these would be wise words, indeed. But in the last two decades, it has experienced an unprecedented expansion, now accounting for roughly 15 percent of the world's GDP. I like to call it the Global Shadow Economy, or McMafia, for short. So what triggered this extraordinary growth in cross-border crime? Well, of course, there is globalization, technology, communications, all that stuff, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But first, I would like to take you back to this event: the collapse of communism. All across Eastern Europe, a most momentous episode in our post-war history. Now it's time for full disclosure. This event meant a great deal to me personally. I had started smuggling books across the Iron Curtain to Democratic opposition groups in Eastern Europe, like Solidarity in Poland, when I was in my teens. I then started writing about Eastern Europe, and eventually I became the BBC's chief correspondent for the region, which is what I was doing in 1989. And so when 425 million people finally won the right to choose their own governments, I was ecstatic, but I was also a touch worried about some of the nastier things lurking behind the wall. It wasn't long, for example, before ethnic nationalism reared its bloody head in Yugoslavia. And amongst the chaos, amidst the euphoria, it took me a little while to understand that some of the people who had wielded power before 1989, in Eastern Europe, continued to do so after the revolutions there. Obviously there were characters like this. But there were also some more unexpected people who played a critical role in what was going on in Eastern Europe. Like this character. Remember these guys? They used to win the gold medals in weightlifting and wrestling, every four years in the Olympics, and they were the great celebrities of communism, with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it. They used to get great apartments in the center of town, casual sex on tap, and they could travel to the West very freely, which was a great luxury at the time. It may come as a surprise, but they played a critical role in the emergence of the market economy in Eastern Europe. Or as I like to call them, they are the midwives of capitalism. Here are some of those same weightlifters after their 1989 makeover. Now in Bulgaria — this photograph was taken in Bulgaria — when communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe, it wasn't just communism; it was the state that collapsed as well. That means your police force wasn't working. The court system wasn't functioning properly. So what was a business man in the brave new world of East European capitalism going to do to make sure that his contracts would be honored? Well, he would turn to people who were called, rather prosaically by sociologists, privatized law enforcement agencies. We prefer to know them as the mafia. And in Bulgaria, the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991. Now, when your state is collapsing, your economy is heading south at a rate of knots, the last people you want coming on to the labor market are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills are surveillance, are smuggling, building underground networks and killing people. But that's what happened all over Eastern Europe. Now, when I was working in the 1990s, I spent most of the time covering the appalling conflict in Yugoslavia. And I couldn't help notice that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities, the paramilitary organizations, were actually the same people running the organized criminal syndicates. And I came to think that behind the violence lay a sinister criminal enterprise. And so I resolved to travel around the world examining this global criminal underworld by talking to policemen, by talking to victims, by talking to consumers of illicit goods and services. But above all else, by talking to the gangsters themselves. And the Balkans was a fabulous place to start. Why? Well of course there was the issue of law and order collapsing, but also, as they say in the retail trade, it's location, location, location. And what I noticed at the beginning of my research that the Balkans had turned into a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world. Heroin, cocaine, women being trafficked into prostitution and precious minerals. And where were they heading? The European Union, which by now was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization, transforming it into the most affluent consumer market in history, eventually comprising some 500 million people. And a significant minority of those 500 million people like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash sleeping with prostitutes, sticking 50 Euro notes up their nose and employing illegal migrant laborers. Now, organized crime in a globalizing world operates in the same way as any other business. It has zones of production, like Afghanistan and Columbia. It has zones of distribution, like Mexico and the Balkans. And then, of course, it has zones of consumption, like the European Union, Japan and of course, the United States. The zones of production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world, and they are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed. Take Mexico, for example. Six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade. But what about the Democratic Republic of Congo? Since 1998, five million people have died there. It's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers, but it's the biggest conflict on this planet since the Second World War. And why is it? Because mafias from all around the world cooperate with local paramilitaries in order to seize the supplies of the rich mineral resources of the region. In the year 2000, 80 percent of the world's coltan was sourced to the killing fields of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone, in almost every laptop and games console. The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons, and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets. And it is this Western desire to consume that is the primary driver of international organized crime. Now, let me show you some of my friends in action, caught conveniently on film by the Italian police, and smuggling duty-not-paid cigarettes. Now, cigarettes out the factory gate are very cheap. The European Union then imposes the highest taxes on them in the world. So if you can smuggle them into the E.U., there are very handsome profits to be made, and I want to show you this to demonstrate the type of resources available to these groups. This boat is worth one million Euros when it's new. And it's the fastest thing on European waters. From 1994, for seven years, 20 of these boats made the trip across the Adriatic, from Montenegro to Italy, every single night. And as a consequence of this trade, Britain alone lost eight billion dollars in revenue. And instead that money went to underwrite the wars in Yugoslavia and line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals. Now Italian police, when this trade started, had just two boats which could go at the same speed. And this is very important, because the only way you can catch these guys is if they run out of gas. Sometimes the gangsters would bring with them women being trafficked into prostitution, and if the police intervened, they would hurl the women into the sea so that the police had to go and save them from drowning, rather than chasing the bad guys. So I have shown you this to demonstrate how many boats, how many vessels it takes to catch one of these guys. And the answer is six vessels. And remember, 20 of these speed boats were coming across the Adriatic every single night. So what were these guys doing with all the money they were making? Well, this is where we come to globalization, because that was not just the deregulation of global trade. It was the liberalization of international financial markets. And boy, did that make it easy for the money launderers. The last two decades have been the champagne era for dirty lucre. In the 1990s, we saw financial centers around the world competing for their business, and there was simply no effective mechanism to prevent money laundering. And a lot of licit banks were also happy to accept deposits from very dubious sources without questions being asked. But at the heart of this, is the offshore banking network. Now these things are an essential part of the money laundering parade, and if you want to do something about illegal tax evasion and transnational organized crime, money laundering, you have to get rid of them. On a positive note, we at last have someone in the White House who has consistently spoken out against these corrosive entities. And if anyone is concerned about what I believe is the necessity for new legislation, regulation, effective regulation, I say, let's take a look at Bernie Madoff, who is now going to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Bernie Madoff stole 65 billion dollars. That puts him up there on the Olympus of gangsters with the Colombian cartels and the major Russian crime syndicates, but he did this for decades in the very heart of Wall Street, and no regulator picked up on it. So how many other Madoffs are there on Wall Street or in the city of London, fleecing ordinary folk and money laundering? Well I can tell you, it's quite a few of them. Let me go on to the 101 of international organized crime now. And that is narcotics. Our second marijuana farm photograph for the morning. This one, however, is in central British Columbia where I photographed it. It's one of the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop grow-ops in B.C. which ensure that over five percent of the province's GDP is accounted for by this trade. Now, I was taken by inspector Brian Cantera, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to a cavernous warehouse east of Vancouver to see some of the goods which are regularly confiscated by the RCMP from the smugglers who are sending it, of course, down south to the United States where there is an insatiable market for B.C. Bud, as it's called, in part because it's marketed as organic, which of course goes down very well in California. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, even by the police's admission, this makes not a dent in the profits, really, of the major exporters. Since the beginning of globalization, the global narcotics market has expanded enormously. There has, however, been no concomitant increase in the resources available to police forces. This, however, may all be about to change, because something very strange is going on. The United Nations recognized earlier this — it was last month actually — that Canada has become a key area of distribution and production of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs. Interestingly, the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down, because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs. Now that is a game changer, because it shifts production away from the developing world and into the Western world. When that happens, it is a trend which is set to overwhelm our policing capacity in the West. The drugs policy which we've had in place for 40 years is long overdue for a very serious rethink, in my opinion. Now, the recession. Well, organized crime has already adapted very well to the recession. Not surprising, the most opportunistic industry in the whole world. And it has no rules to its regulatory system. Except, of course, it has two business risks: arrest by law enforcement, which is, frankly, the least of their worries, and competition from other groups, i.e. a bullet in the back of the head. What they've done is they've shifted their operations. People don't smoke as much dope, or visit prostitutes quite so frequently during a recession. And so instead, they have invaded financial and corporate crime in a big way, but above all, two sectors, and that is counterfeit goods and cybercrime. And it's been terribly successful. I would like to introduce you to Mr. Pringle. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, Señor Pringle. I was introduced to this bit of kit by a Brazilian cybercriminal. We sat in a car on the Avenue Paulista in São Paulo, together. Hooked it up to my laptop, and within about five minutes he had penetrated the computer security system of a major Brazilian bank. It's really not that difficult. And it's actually much easier because the fascinating thing about cybercrime is that it's not so much the technology. The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering. Or to use the technical term for it, there's one born every minute. You would not believe how easy it is to persuade people to do things with their computers which are objectively not in their interest. And it was very soon when the cybercriminals learned that the quickest way to do this, of course, the quickest way to a person's wallet is through the promise of sex and love. I expect some of you remember the ILOVEYOU virus, one of the very great worldwide viruses that came. I was very fortunate when the ILOVEYOU virus came out, because the first person I received it from was an ex-girlfriend of mine. Now, she harbored all sorts of sentiments and emotions towards me at the time, but love was not amongst them. (Laughter) And so as soon as I saw this drop into my inbox, I dispatched it hastily to the recycle bin and spared myself a very nasty infection. So, cybercrime, do watch out for it. One thing that we do know that the Internet is doing is the Internet is assisting these guys. These are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense. Now, Artesunate is a very effective drug at destroying the parasite in the early days of infection. But over the past year or so, researchers in Cambodia have discovered that what's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance. And they fear that the reason why it's developing a resistance is because Cambodians can't afford the drugs on the commercial market, and so they buy it from the Internet. And these pills contain only low doses of the active ingredient. Which is why the parasite is beginning to develop a resistance. The reason I say this is because we have to know that organized crime impacts all sorts of areas of our lives. You don't have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments. This is no longer an issue of Sicilians from Palermo and New York. There is no romance involved with gangsters in the 21st Century. This is a mighty industry, and it creates instability and violence wherever it goes. It is a major economic force and we need to take it very, very seriously. It's been a privilege talking to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

3 warp-speed architecture tales

{0: 'Bjarke Ingels believes that architecture is the art and science of making sure our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, the architectural object. Is the latest tower in London a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool? So recently, we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn't have to invent it, it already existed in the form of a comic book. So we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes, how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation. Sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world. We call this comic book "Yes is More," which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes. In this case it's Mies van der Rohe's Less is More. He triggered the modernist revolution. After him followed the post-modern counter-revolution, Robert Venturi saying, "Less is a bore." After him, Philip Johnson sort of introduced (Laughter) you could say promiscuity, or at least openness to new ideas with, "I am a whore." Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis. And what we'd like to say with "Yes is More" is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined, as who or what we are against. The cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment. Or this idea of the misunderstood genius, frustrated that the world doesn't fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we're much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world. In fact, I actually think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process. His famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings. At each meeting, there's way too many ideas. Only the best ones can survive. And through a process of architectural selection, we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model. We mate them. They have sort of mutant offspring. And through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in Copenhagen. The design process was really tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved: this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city, sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but sort of public on the outside, as well as on the inside, with the library. But Darwin doesn't only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a subspecies branches off. And quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea. It doesn't really work in this context. But for another client in another culture, it could really be the right answer to a different question. So as a result, we never throw anything out. We keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it. And what I'd like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world. The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. And we saw this guy, Haibao. He's the mascot of the expo, and he looks strangely familiar. In fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn't exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn't think so either. So we lost. But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman who saw our design and said, "Wow, that's the Chinese character for the word 'people.'" (Laughter) So, apparently this is how you write "people," as in the People's Republic of China. We even double checked. And at the same time, we got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai Creative Industry Week. So we thought like, this is too much of an opportunity, so we hired a feng shui master. We scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and went to China. (Laughter) So the People's Building, as we called it. This is our two interpreters, sort of reading the architecture. It went on the cover of the Wen Wei Po newspaper, which got Mr. Liangyu Chen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. And we had the chance to explain the project. And he said, "Shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers," but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People's Building, he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China. So we obviously profoundly agreed with him. (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, Mr. Chen is now in prison for corruption. (Laughter) But like I said, Haibao looked very familiar, because he is actually the Chinese character for "people." And they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is "Better City, Better Life." Sustainability. And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good. You know, you're not supposed to take long, warm showers. You're not supposed to fly on holidays because it's bad for the environment. Gradually, you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life. So we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves, what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant? You know, it's one of the biggest countries in the world, one of the smallest. China symbolized by the dragon. Denmark, we have a national bird, the swan. (Laughter) China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People's Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Sheng, or Hans Christian Anderson, as we call him. So that means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Matchstick Girl" and "The Little Mermaid." It's almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture. The biggest tourist attraction in China is the Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon. The big tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little Mermaid. That can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours. (Laughter) And it sort of shows the difference between these two cities. Copenhagen, Shanghai, modern, European. But then we looked at recent urban development, and we noticed that this is like a Shanghai street, 30 years ago. All bikes, no cars. This is how it looks today; all traffic jam. Bicycles have become forbidden many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we're actually expanding the bicycle lanes. A third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city. So we thought, why don't we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate 1,000 bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the expo, go straight to the Danish pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions. Like I said, Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in Copenhagen, sort of continuing the public realm into the water. So we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda, images, statements, but no real experience. So just like with a bike, we don't talk about it. You can try it. Like with the water, instead of talking about it, we're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people normally object that it doesn't sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for ballast. So we can actually hitch a ride for free. And in the middle of this sort of harbor bath, we're actually going to put the actual Little Mermaid. So the real Mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes. And when she's gone, we're going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes. When you go to the exhibition, you'll see the Mermaid and the pool. You'll walk around, start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo. So when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project. And to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese state censorship. The first thing, the China map missed Taiwan. It's a very serious political issue in China. We will add on. The second thing, we had compared the swan to the dragon, and then the Chinese state said, "Suggest change to panda." (Laughter) (Applause) So, when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument, the National People's Party sort of rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the Mermaid. So for the first time, I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting because in the morning, from 9 to 11, they were discussing the bailout package — how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy. And then at 11 o'clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1, they were debating whether or not to send the Mermaid to China. (Laughter) (Applause) But to conclude, if you want to see the Mermaid from May to December next year, don't come to Copenhagen, because she's going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda. (Laughter) So the second story that I'd like to tell is, actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the Leonardo DiCaprio balcony. And they form this sort of vertical backyard where, on a nice summer day, you'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters. The house is sort of a distortion of a square block. Trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views, instead of into each other. Until recently, this was the view from my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. And he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure. And we thought, rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don't we turn all the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars. And because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we sort of cut up the volume, so we wouldn't block the view from my apartment. (Laughter) And essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments. And up in the sun, you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view, and a sort of dense urban location. This is our first architectural model. This is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially, the apartments cover the parking. They are accessed through this diagonal elevator. It's actually a stand-up product from Switzerland, because in Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators. (Laughter) And the facade of the parking, we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. And we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. And since we always refer to the project as The Mountain, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork. (Applause) So if you go back into the parking, into the corridors, it's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors, into this sort of south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades. If you go even further, it turns into this green garden. And all the rainwater that drops on the Mountain is actually accumulated. And there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens, in one or two years it will sort of transform into a Cambodian temple ruin, completely covered in green. So, the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy. This idea that you can actually create, if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients, like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both. As an architect, it's really hard to set the agenda. You can't just say that now I'd like to do a sustainable city in central Asia, because that's not really how you get commissions. You always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen, and the sort of turmoil of the world. One last example is that recently we, like last summer, we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. (Laughter) It was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity. Unfortunately, it was the national bank of Iceland. At the same time, we actually had a visitor — a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see the Mountain. And he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture, because Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia. So he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan. So we took the commission. And we made this small movie that I'd like to show. We quite often make little movies. We always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song. So basically, Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we are planning — almost like the diagram of their flag. And our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable of human life. Then we place these mountains on the island, surrounding this sort of central green valley, almost like a central park. And what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert. It has no vegetation. It has no water. It has no energy, no resources. So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings. And all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green, lush landscape. So, you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature, in this case it's actually creating nature. And the buildings, they don't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains, they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind. They accumulate the solar energy. They accumulate the water. So they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem. So we recently presented the master plan, and it has gotten approved. And this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains, in what's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia. (Applause) Yes, maybe just to round off. So in a way you can see how the Mountain in Copenhagen sort of evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan. With a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in 10 years it could be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you. (Applause)

An inventory of the invisible

{0: 'John Lloyd helps make some of the cleverest television in the UK. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

So the question is, what is invisible? There is more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say. Everything that matters except every thing and except matter. We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. As in this cryptic sentence I found in The Guardian recently: "The marriage suffered a setback in 1965, when the husband was killed by the wife." (Laughter) There's a world of invisibility there, isn't there? (Laughter) So, we can see the stars and the planets, but we can't see what holds them apart or what draws them together. With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. We can't see into the engine room. We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy. So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible. One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you. And I'm now going to make it visible to you in your minds. It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens. The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency. Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness. (Laughter) Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her. A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph. After her name, written in brackets was the apt description, horse face. (Laughter) "I've misjudged this women," thought Mr. Dickens. "Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage. A photo is not enough." So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in. And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, "To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P." After it had been sent off, his secretary said to him, "Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete? I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was." (Laughter) I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you? (Laughter) So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand. Gravity is one thing that we can't see and which we don't understand. It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest. And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. That's what he thought he was there for. So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know. (Laughter) Consciousness. I see all your faces. I have no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds? But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough. But we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing. In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion, which some claim is the route of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say. But their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist. So that's why we don't think it exists, the Sufi masters working on us. In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere. We have no idea how consciousness works. With artificial intelligence, not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity. (Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful. Remind you of anyone? Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic. I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms. (Laughter) Another thing we can't see is the human genome. And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago, when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100,000 genes. Geneticists will know this, but every year since, it's been revised downwards. We now think there are likely to be only just over 20,000 genes in the human genome. This is extraordinary. Because rice — get this — rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. Potatoes, potatoes have 48 chromosomes. Do you know that? Two more than people, and the same as a gorilla. (Laughter) You can't see these things, but they are very strange. (Laughter) The stars by day. I always think that's fascinating. The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see. Time, nobody can see time. I don't know if you know this. Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously. And you can't see the past, except in your memory. One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see. My son asked me this the other day, he said, "Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Why can't I?" Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three, which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job. Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are. Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang. This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff. But every cell in your body is replaced at some point. Taste buds, every 10 days or so. Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer. A spine takes several years. But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. The question is, who, then, are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us? Okay. Atoms, you can't see them. Nobody ever will. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. Gas, you can't see that. Interesting. Somebody mentioned 1600 recently. Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont. It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. Quite good. He also invented a word called "blas," meaning astral radiation. Didn't catch on, unfortunately. (Laughter) But well done, him. (Laughter) There is so many things that — Light. You can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness. Electricity, you can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity. They don't. Nobody knows what it is. (Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on. They don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. (Laughter) Galaxies, 100 billion of them estimated in the universe. 100 billion. How many can we see? Five. Five out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye, and one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight. Radio waves. There's another thing. Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. And somebody said to him, "Well what's the point of these, Heinrich? What's the point of these radio waves that you've found?" And he said, "Well, I've no idea. But I guess somebody will find a use for them someday." And that's what they do, radio. That's what they discovered. Anyway, so the biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know. It is incredible how little we know. Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything." And I've come to the conclusion — because you've asked this other question, "What's another thing you can't see?" The point, most of us. What's the point? (Laughter) (Applause) You can't see a point. It's by definition dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough. But the point, what I've got it down to, is there are only two questions really worth asking. "Why are we here?" and "What should we do about it while we are? And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century, one a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet. The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, "I don't know why we are here. But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves." (Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard wasn't he? (Laughter) And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea." (Laughter) (Applause)

What hallucination reveals about our minds

{0: 'Since "Awakenings" stormed the bestseller lists (and the silver screen), Oliver Sacks has become an unlikely household name, single-handedly inventing the genre of neurological anthropology.'}

TED2009

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes. We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well. And hallucinations are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under control. They seem to come from the outside and to mimic perception. So I am going to be talking about hallucinations and a particular sort of visual hallucination, which I see among my patients. A few months ago, I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work. They told me that one of their residents, an old lady in her 90s, was seeing things, and they wondered if she'd gone bonkers or, because she was an old lady, whether she'd had a stroke, or whether she had Alzheimer's. And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie, the old lady. I went in to see her. It was evident straightaway that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence, but she'd been very startled and very bewildered, because she'd been seeing things. And she told me — the nurses hadn't mentioned this — that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years. But now, for the last few days, she'd been seeing things. So I said, "What sort of things?" And she said, "People in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. A man who turns towards me and smiles, but he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals too. I see a white building. It's snowing, a soft snow. I see this horse with a harness, dragging the snow away. Then, one night, the scene changes. I see cats and dogs walking towards me. They come to a certain point and then stop. Then it changes again. I see a lot of children. They're walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like Eastern dress." Sometimes, she said, before the people come on, she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor, which seem to go up to the ceiling. I said, "Is this like a dream?" And she said, "No, it's not like a dream. It's like a movie." She said, "It's got color. It's got motion. But it's completely silent, like a silent movie." And she said it's a rather boring movie. (Laughter) She said, "All these people with Eastern dress, walking up and down, very repetitive, very limited." (Laughter) And she had a sense of humor. She knew it was a hallucination, but she was frightened. She had lived 95 years, and she'd never had a hallucination before. She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing, that they seemed to come on by themselves, or disappear. She had no control over them. She said she didn't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations, and none of the people or the animals — well, they all seemed oblivious of her. And she didn't know what was going on. She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind. Well, I examined her carefully. She was a bright old lady, perfectly sane. She had no medical problems. She wasn't on any medications which could produce hallucinations. But she was blind. And I then said to her, "I think I know what you have." I said, "There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness. This was originally described," I said, "right back in the 18th century, by a man called Charles Bonnet. And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome. There's nothing wrong with your brain. There's nothing wrong with your mind. You have Charles Bonnet syndrome." And she was very relieved at this, that there was nothing seriously the matter, and also rather curious. She said, "Who is this Charles Bonnet?" She said, "Did he have them himself?" And she said, "Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." (Laughter) "I'm not crazy. I'm not demented. I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." Well, so, I did tell the nurses. Now this, for me, is a common situation. I work in old-age homes, largely. I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing-impaired or visually impaired. About 10 percent of the hearing-impaired people get musical hallucinations. And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations. You don't have to be completely blind, only sufficiently impaired. Now, with the original description in the 18th century, Charles Bonnet did not have them. His grandfather had these hallucinations. His grandfather was a magistrate, an elderly man. He'd had cataract surgery. His vision was pretty poor. And in 1759, he described to his grandson various things he was seeing. The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair. It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles. And he knew it was a hallucination. You don't have handkerchiefs in midair. And then he saw a big wheel in midair. But sometimes he wasn't sure whether he was hallucinating or not, because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions. So on one occasion, when his granddaughters were visiting them, he said, "And who are these handsome young men with you?" (Laughter) And they said, "Alas, Grandpapa, there are no handsome young men." And then the handsome young men disappeared. It's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash. They don't usually fade in and out. They are rather sudden, and they change suddenly. Charles Lullin, the grandfather, saw hundreds of different figures, different landscapes of all sorts. On one occasion, he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, and realized it was himself. That was the only figure he recognized. On one occasion, when he was walking in the streets of Paris, he saw — this was real — a scaffolding. But when he got back home, he saw a miniature of the scaffolding, six inches high, on his study table. This repetition of perception is sometimes called "palinopsia." With him and with Rosalie, what seems to be going on — and Rosalie said, "What's going on?" — and I said that as you lose vision, as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input, they become hyperactive and excitable, and they start to fire spontaneously. And you start to see things. The things you see can be very complicated indeed. With another patient of mine who also had some vision, the visions she had could be disturbing. On one occasion, she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. And he turned round, and then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together, like a concertina. Once, when she was driving, or rather, her husband was driving, the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads. She had very mobile hallucinations as well. A lot of them had to do with a car. Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. He was very tenacious, and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned. And then when they came to a stop, the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff, 100 foot in the air, and then disappear. Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination. This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex. And, above all, she would see cartoons. And these cartoons would be transparent, and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. And especially, she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog. (Laughter) Now, I don't watch Sesame Street, but she made a point of saying, "Why Kermit?" she said, "Kermit the Frog means nothing to me." You know, I was wondering about Freudian determinants: Why Kermit? "Kermit the Frog means nothing to me." She didn't mind the cartoons too much. But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces, and as with Rosalie, the faces were often deformed, with very large teeth or very large eyes. And these frightened her. Well, what is going on with these people? As a physician, I have to try and define what's going on and to reassure people, especially to reassure them that they're not going insane. Something like 10 percent, as I said, of visually impaired people get these. But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something. And if they do mention them to their own doctors, they may be misdiagnosed. In particular, the notion is that if you see things or hear things, you're going mad. But the psychotic hallucinations are quite different. Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you, they seduce you, they humiliate you, they jeer at you. You interact with them. There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. There is a film. You're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you — or that's how people think about it. There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past. You're at a particular road junction. You smell chestnuts roasting. You hear the traffic. All the senses are involved. And you're waiting for your girl. And it's that Tuesday evening back in 1982. The temporal lobe hallucinations are all sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic. The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different. In the Charles Bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of levels, from the geometrical hallucinations — the pink and blue squares the woman had — up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces. Faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. And one of the second commonest is cartoons. So, what is going on? Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it's been possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating, and, in fact, to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating. When people have these simple, geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated. This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns. You don't form images with your primary visual cortex. When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved, in the temporal lobe. And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. And it's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus, they may lose the ability to recognize faces. But if there's an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations. There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons and when one hallucinates them. It's very interesting that that should be specific. There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes. Around 1970, it was found that there were not only parts of the brain, but particular cells. "Face cells" were discovered around 1970. And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific. So you may not only have "car" cells, you may have "Aston Martin" cells. (Laughter) I saw an Aston Martin this morning. I had to bring it in. (Laughter) And now it's in there, somewhere. So — (Laughter) now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments. It's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion. And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, you don't go to those higher levels. You're in these levels of inferior visual cortex, where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images, or figments or fragmentary figments, all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells. Normally, these are all part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them. It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. So, suddenly, you see a face. Suddenly, you see a car. Suddenly this and suddenly that. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this, but not terribly successfully. When these were first described, it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams. But, in fact, people say, "I don't recognize the people. I can't form any associations. Kermit means nothing to me." You don't get anywhere, thinking of them as dreams. Well, I've more or less said what I wanted. I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common. Think of the number of blind people. There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations but are too scared to mention them. So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public. Finally, I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable, for giving one some insight as to how the brain works. Charles Bonnet said, 250 years ago — he wondered how, thinking of these hallucinations, how, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, 250 years later, I think we're beginning to glimpse how this is done. Thanks very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was superb. Thank you so much. You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients. Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about? Oliver Sacks: I was afraid you would ask that. (Laughter) Well, yeah, a lot of them. And, actually, I'm a little visually impaired myself. I'm blind in one eye and not terribly good in the other. And I see the geometrical hallucinations. But they stop there. CA: And they don't disturb you? Because you understand what's doing it, it doesn't make you worried? OS: Well, they don't disturb me any more than my tinnitus, which I ignore. They occasionally interest me, and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks. I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is ticking over. And when I see all these hexagons and complex things, which I also have, in visual migraine, I wonder whether everyone sees things like this and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit. CA: That was an utterly, utterly fascinating talk. Thank you so much for sharing. OS: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

"Wait It Out"

{0: "Imogen Heap's aching voice and surprising electronics infuse countless videos and iPods with bone-chilling atmospherics."}

TEDGlobal 2009

♫ Where do we go from here? ♫ ♫ How do we carry on? ♫ ♫ I can't get beyond the questions ♫ ♫ Clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us, collapsed ♫ ♫ It cuts me with every could have been ♫ ♫ Pain on pain on play, repeating ♫ ♫ With the backup, makeshift life in waiting ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ What of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ There is nothing to see here now ♫ ♫ Turning the sign around ♫ ♫ We're closed to the Earth 'til further notice ♫ ♫ A crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫ ♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫ ♫ All I want, only one street level miracle ♫ ♫ I'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫ ♫ But what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ And sit here cold? ♫ ♫ We will be long gone by then ♫ ♫ In lackluster ♫ ♫ In dust we lay around old magazines ♫ ♫ Fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫ ♫ for all we could and should be being ♫ ♫ in the one life that we've got ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ And what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Wait it out ♫ (Applause)

The Web as random acts of kindness

{0: "Jonathan Zittrain wants to make sure the electronic frontier stays open -- and he's looking to the Internet's millions of users for its salvation."}

TEDGlobal 2009

My name is Jonathan Zittrain, and in my recent work I've been a bit of a pessimist. So I thought this morning I would try to be the optimist, and give reason to hope for the future of the Internet by drawing upon its present. Now, it may seem like there is less hope today than there was before. People are less kind. There is less trust around. I don't know. As a simple example, we could run a test here. How many people have ever hitchhiked? I know. How many people have hitchhiked within the past 10 years? Right. So what has changed? It's not better public transportation. So that's one reason to think that we might be declensionists, going in the wrong direction. But I want to give you three examples to try to say that the trend line is in fact in the other direction, and it's the Internet helping it along. So example number one: the Internet itself. These are three of the founders of the Internet. They were actually high school classmates together at the same high school in suburban Los Angles in the 1960s. You might have had a French club or a Debate club. They had a "Let's build a global network" club, and it worked out very well. They are pictured here for their 25th anniversary Newsweek retrospective on the Internet. And as you can tell, they are basically goof balls. They had one great limitation and one great freedom as they tried to conceive of a global network. The limitation was that they didn't have any money. No particular amount of capital to invest, of the sort that for a physical network you might need for trucks and people and a hub to move packages around overnight. They had none of that. But they had an amazing freedom, which was they didn't have to make any money from it. The Internet has no business plan, never did. No CEO, no firm responsible, singly, for building it. Instead, it's folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to, or because they were expecting to make a mint off of it. That ethos led to a network architecture, a structure that was unlike other digital networks then or since. So unusual, in fact, that it was said that it's not clear the Internet could work. As late as 1992, IBM was known to say you couldn't possibly build a corporate network using Internet Protocol. And even some Internet engineers today say the whole thing is a pilot project and the jury is still out. (Laughter) That's why the mascot of Internet engineering, if it had one, is said to be the bumblebee. Because the fur-to-wingspan ratio of the bumblebee is far too large for it to be able to fly. And yet, mysteriously, somehow the bee flies. I'm pleased to say that, thanks to massive government funding, about three years ago we finally figured out how bees fly. (Laughter) It's very complicated, but it turns out they flap their wings very quickly. (Laughter) So what is this bizarre architecture configuration that makes the network sing and be so unusual? Well, to move data around from one place to another — again, it's not like a package courier. It's more like a mosh pit. (Laughter) Imagine, you being part of a network where, you're maybe at a sporting event, and you're sitting in rows like this, and somebody asks for a beer, and it gets handed at the aisle. And your neighborly duty is to pass the beer along, at risk to your own trousers, to get it to the destination. No one pays you to do this. It's just part of your neighborly duty. And, in a way, that's exactly how packets move around the Internet, sometimes in as many as 25 or 30 hops, with the intervening entities that are passing the data around having no particular contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver. Now, of course, in a mosh pit it's hard to specify a destination. You need a lot of trust, but it's not like, "I'm trying to get to Pensacola, please." So the Internet needs addressing and directions. It turns out there is no one overall map of the Internet. Instead, again, it is as if we are all sitting together in a theater, but we can only see amidst the fog the people immediately around us. So what do we do to figure out who is where? We turn to the person on the right, and we tell that person what we see on our left, and vice versa. And they can lather, rinse, repeat. And before you know it, you have a general sense of where everything is. This is how Internet addressing and routing actually work. This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable. In rare but striking instances, a single lie told by just one entity in this honeycomb can lead to real trouble. So, for example, last year, the government of Pakistan asked its Internet service providers there to prevent citizens of Pakistan from seeing YouTube. There was a video there that the government did not like and they wanted to make sure it was blocked. This is a common occurrence. Governments everywhere are often trying to block and filter and censor content on the Internet. Well this one ISP in Pakistan chose to effectuate the block for its subscribers in a rather unusual way. It advertised — the way that you might be asked, if you were part of the Internet, to declare what you see near you — it advertised that near it, in fact, it had suddenly awakened to find that it was YouTube. "That's right," it said, "I am YouTube." Which meant that packets of data from subscribers going to YouTube stopped at the ISP, since they thought they were already there, and the ISP threw them away unopened because the point was to block it. But it didn't stop there. You see, that announcement went one click out, which got reverberated, one click out. And it turns out that as you look at the postmortem of this event, you have at one moment perfectly working YouTube. Then, at moment number two, you have the fake announcement go out. And within two minutes, it reverberates around and YouTube is blocked everywhere in the world. If you were sitting in Oxford, England, trying to get to YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and they weren't coming back. Now just think about that. One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it. And yet, somehow, within about two hours, the problem was fixed. How did this happen? Well, for a big clue, we turn to NANOG. The North American Network Operators Group, a group of people who, on a beautiful day outside, enter into a windowless room, at their terminals reading email and messages in fixed proportion font, like this, and they talk about networks. And some of them are mid-level employees at Internet service providers around the world. And here is the message where one of them says, "Looks like we've got a live one. We have a hijacking of YouTube! This is not a drill. It's not just the cluelessness of YouTube engineers. I promise. Something is up in Pakistan." And they came together to help find the problem and fix it. So it's kind of like if your house catches on fire. The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is random people apparate from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise. (Applause) I was trying to think of the right model to describe this form of random acts of kindness by geeky strangers. (Laughter) You know, it's just like the hail goes out and people are ready to help. And it turns out this model is everywhere, once you start looking for it. Example number two: Wikipedia. If a man named Jimbo came up to you in 2001 and said, "I've got a great idea! We start with seven articles that anybody can edit anything, at any time, and we'll get a great encyclopedia! Eh?" Right. Dumbest idea ever. (Laughter) In fact, Wikipedia is an idea so profoundly stupid that even Jimbo never had it. Jimbo's idea was for Nupedia. It was going to be totally traditional. He would pay people money because he was feeling like a good guy, and the money would go to the people and they would write the articles. The wiki was introduced so others could make suggestions on edits — as almost an afterthought, a back room. And then it turns out the back room grew to encompass the entire project. And today, Wikipedia is so ubiquitous that you can now find it on Chinese restaurant menus. (Laughter) I am not making this up. (Laughter) I have a theory I can explain later. Suffice it to say for now that I prefer my Wikipedia stir-fried with pimentos. (Laughter) But now, Wikipedia doesn't just spontaneously work. How does it really work? It turns out there is a back room that is kind of windowless, metaphorically speaking. And there are a bunch of people who, on a sunny day, would rather be inside and monitoring this, the administrator's notice board, itself a wiki page that anyone can edit. And you just bring your problems to the page. It's reminiscent of the description of history as "one damn thing after another," right? Number one: "Tendentious editing by user Andyvphil." Apologies, Andyvphil, if you're here today. I'm not taking sides. "Anon attacking me for reverting." Here is my favorite: "A long story." (Laughter) It turns out there are more people checking this page for problems and wanting to solve them than there are problems arising on the page. And that's what keeps Wikipedia afloat. At all times, Wikipedia is approximately 45 minutes away from utter destruction. Right? There are spambots crawling it, trying to turn every article into an ad for a Rolex watch. (Laughter) It's this thin geeky line that keeps it going. Not because it's a job, not because it's a career, but because it's a calling. It's something they feel impelled to do because they care about it. They even gather together in such groups as the Counter-Vandalism Unit — "Civility, Maturity, Responsibility" — to just clean up the pages. It does make you wonder if there were, for instance, a massive, extremely popular Star Trek convention one weekend, who would be minding the store? (Laughter) So what we see — (Laughter) what we see in this phenomenon is something that the crazed, late traffic engineer Hans Monderman discovered in the Netherlands, and here in South Kensington, that sometimes if you remove some of the external rules and signs and everything else, you can actually end up with a safer environment in which people can function, and one in which they are more human with each other. They're realizing that they have to take responsibility for what they do. And Wikipedia has embraced this. Some of you may remember Star Wars Kid, the poor teenager who filmed himself with a golf ball retriever, acting as if it were a light saber. The film, without his permission or even knowledge at first, found its way onto the Internet. Hugely viral video. Extremely popular. Totally mortifying to him. Now, it being encyclopedic and all, Wikipedia had to do an article about Star Wars Kid. Every article on Wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page, and on the discussion page they had extensive argument among the Wikipedians as to whether to have his real name featured in the article. You could see arguments on both sides. Here is just a snapshot of some of them. They eventually decided — not unanimously by any means — not to include his real name, despite the fact that nearly all media reports did. They just didn't think it was the right thing to do. It was an act of kindness. And to this day, the page for Star Wars Kid has a warning right at the top that says you are not to put his real name on the page. If you do, it will be removed immediately, removed by people who may have disagreed with the original decision, but respect the outcome and work to make it stay because they believe in something bigger than their own opinion. As a lawyer, I've got to say these guys are inventing the law and stare decisis and stuff like that as they go along. Now, this isn't just limited to Wikipedia. We see it on blogs all over the place. I mean, this is a 2005 Business Week cover. Wow. Blogs are going to change your business. I know they look silly. And sure they look silly. They start off on all sorts of goofy projects. This is my favorite goofy blog: Catsthatlooklikehitler.com. (Laughter) You send in a picture of your cat if it looks like Hitler. (Laughter) Yeah, I know. Number four, it's like, can you imagine coming home to that cat everyday? (Laughter) But then, you can see the same kind of whimsy applied to people. So this is a blog devoted to unfortunate portraiture. This one says, "Bucolic meadow with split-rail fence. Is that an animal carcass behind her?" (Laughter) You're like, "You know? I think that's an animal carcass behind her." And it's one after the other. But then you hit this one. Image removed at request of owner. That's it. Image removed at request of owner. It turns out that somebody lampooned here wrote to the snarky guy that does the site, not with a legal threat, not with an offer of payment, but just said, "Hey, would you mind?" The person said, "No, that's fine." I believe we can build architectures online to make such human requests that much easier to do, to make it possible for all of us to see that the data we encounter online is just stuff on which to click and paste and copy and forward that actually represents human emotion and endeavor and impact, and to be able to have an ethical moment where we decide how we want to treat it. I even think it can go into the real world. We can end up, as we get in a world with more censors — everywhere there is something filming you, maybe putting it online — to be able to have a little clip you could wear that says, "You know, I'd rather not." And then have technology that the person taking the photo will know later, this person requested to be contacted before this goes anywhere big, if you don't mind. And that person taking the photo can make a decision about how and whether to respect it. In the real world, we see filtering of this sort taking place in Pakistan. And we now have means that we can build, like this system, so that people can report the filtering as they encounter it. And it's no longer just a "I don't know. I couldn't get there. I guess I'll move on," but suddenly a collective consciousness about what is blocked and censored where online. In fact, talk about technology imitating life imitating tech, or maybe it's the other way around. An NYU researcher here took little cardboard robots with smiley faces on them, and a motor that just drove them forward and a flag sticking out the back with a desired destination. It said, "Can you help me get there?" Released it on the streets of Manhattan. (Laughter) They'll fund anything these days. Here is the chart of over 43 people helping to steer the robot that could not steer and get it on its way, from one corner from one corner of Washington Square Park to another. That leads to example number three: hitchhiking. I'm not so sure hitchhiking is dead. Why? There is the Craigslist rideshare board. If it were called the Craigslist hitchhiking board, tumbleweeds would be blowing through it. But it's the rideshare board, and it's basically the same thing. Now why are people using it? I don't know. Maybe they think that, uh, killers don't plan ahead? (Laughter) No. I think the actual answer is that once you reframe it, once you get out of one set of stale expectations from a failed project that had its day, but now, for whatever reason, is tarnished, you can actually rekindle the kind of human kindness and sharing that something like this on Craigslist represents. And then you can highlight it into something like, yes, CouchSurfing.org. CouchSurfing: one guy's idea to, at last, put together people who are going somewhere far away and would like to sleep on a stranger's couch for free, with people who live far away, and would like someone they don't know to sleep on their couch for free. It's a brilliant idea. It's a bee that, yes, flies. Amazing how many successful couch surfings there have been. And if you're wondering, no, there have been no known fatalities associated with CouchSurfing. Although, to be sure, the reputation system, at the moment, works that you leave your report after the couch surfing experience, so there may be some selection bias there. (Laughter) So, my urging, my thought, is that the Internet isn't just a pile of information. It's not a noun. It's a verb. And when you go on it, if you listen and see carefully and closely enough, what you will discover is that that information is saying something to you. What it's saying to you is what we heard yesterday, Demosthenes was saying to us. It's saying, "Let's march." Thank you very much. (Applause)

How the Net aids dictatorships

{0: 'Evgeny Morozov wants to know how the Internet has changed the conduct of global affairs, because it certainly has ... but perhaps not in all the ways we think. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

Good morning. I think, as a grumpy Eastern European, I was brought in to play the pessimist this morning. So bear with me. Well, I come from the former Soviet Republic of Belarus, which, as some of you may know, is not exactly an oasis of liberal democracy. So that's why I've always been fascinated with how technology could actually reshape and open up authoritarian societies like ours. So, I'm graduating college and, feeling very idealistic, I decided to join the NGO which actually was using new media to promote democracy and media reform in much of the former Soviet Union. However, to my surprise, I discovered that dictatorships do not crumble so easily. In fact, some of them actually survived the Internet challenge, and some got even more repressive. So this is when I ran out of my idealism and decided to quit my NGO job and actually study how the Internet could impede democratization. Now, I must tell you that this was never a very popular argument, and it's probably not very popular yet with some of you sitting in this audience. It was never popular with many political leaders, especially those in the United States who somehow thought that new media would be able to do what missiles couldn't. That is, promote democracy in difficult places where everything else has already been tried and failed. And I think by 2009, this news has finally reached Britain, so I should probably add Gordon Brown to this list as well. However, there is an underlying argument about logistics, which has driven so much of this debate. Right? So if you look at it close enough, you'll actually see that much of this is about economics. The cybertopians say, much like fax machines and Xerox machines did in the '80s, blogs and social networks have radically transformed the economics of protest, so people would inevitably rebel. To put it very simply, the assumption so far has been that if you give people enough connectivity, if you give them enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow. And to tell you the truth, I never really bought into this argument, in part because I never saw three American presidents agree on anything else in the past. (Laughter) But, you know, even beyond that, if you think about the logic underlying it, is something I call iPod liberalism, where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy. And again, I think this is kind of false. But I think a much bigger problem with this is that this logic — that we should be dropping iPods not bombs — I mean, it would make a fascinating title for Thomas Friedman's new book. (Laughter) But this is rarely a good sign. Right? So, the bigger problem with this logic is that it confuses the intended versus the actual uses of technology. For those of you who think that new media of the Internet could somehow help us avert genocide, should look no further than Rwanda, where in the '90s it was actually two radio stations which were responsible for fueling much of the ethnic hatred in the first place. But even beyond that, coming back to the Internet, what you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes. Right? And they are building what I call the Spinternet. The combination of spin, on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. So governments from Russia to China to Iran are actually hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues. Right? So you may wonder, why on Earth are they doing it? Why are they engaging with cyberspace? Well my theory is that it's happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places. The moment you put something critical in a blog, even if you manage to ban it immediately, it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs. So the more you block it, the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game. So the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being, for example, a CIA agent. And, again, this is happening quite often. Just to give you an example of how it works in China, for example. There was a big case in February 2009 called "Elude the Cat." And for those of you who didn't know, I'll just give a little summary. So what happened is that a 24-year-old man, a Chinese man, died in prison custody. And police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek, which is "elude the cat" in Chinese slang, with other inmates and hit his head against the wall, which was not an explanation which sat well with many Chinese bloggers. So they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments. In fact, QQ.com, which is a popular Chinese website, had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours. But then authorities did something very smart. Instead of trying to purge these comments, they instead went and reached out to the bloggers. And they basically said, "Look guys. We'd like you to become netizen investigators." So 500 people applied, and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question, and thus inspect it and then blog about it. Within days the entire incident was forgotten, which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content. People would keep talking about it for weeks. And this actually fits with another interesting theory about what's happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace. This is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation, and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online. We tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships, but in many cases it only strengthens them. And you may wonder why. I'll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators. And first it's quite simple. Most of them operate in a complete information vacuum. They don't really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime. So encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise, low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what's actually happening in the country, right? So from this perspective, having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great. Secondly, involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail. Because they say, "Well look, we asked you, we consulted you, you voted on it. You put it on the front page of your blog. Well, great. You are the one who is to blame." And finally, the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes, both at home and abroad. So inviting people to all sorts of public forums, having them participate in decision making, it's actually great. Because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say, "Well, we are having a democracy. We are having a forum." Just to give you an example, one of the Russian regions, for example, now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020. Right? So they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020. I mean, anyone who has been to Russia would know that there was no planning in Russia for the next month. So having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything, because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda. Just to give you an example from Iran, we all heard about the Twitter revolution that happened there, but if you look close enough, you'll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook were actually operational. They may have become slower, but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states. And it's great simply because they can gather open source intelligence. In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. I mean KGB, and not just KGB, used to torture in order to actually get this data. Now it's all available online. (Laughter) But I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cybertopians made is when it comes to digital natives, people who have grown up online. We often hear about cyber activism, how people are getting more active because of the Internet. Rarely hear about cyber hedonism, for example, how people are becoming passive. Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography. That's not an option being considered too strongly. So for every digital renegade that is revolting in the streets of Tehran, there may as well be two digital captives who are actually rebelling only in the World of Warcraft. And this is realistic. And there is nothing wrong about it because the Internet has greatly empowered many of these young people and it plays a completely different social role for them. If you look at some of the surveys on how the young people actually benefit from the Internet, you'll see that the number of teenagers in China, for example, for whom the Internet actually broadens their sex life, is three times more than in the United States. So it does play a social role, however it may not necessarily lead to political engagement. So the way I tend to think of it is like a hierarchy of cyber-needs in space, a total rip-off from Abraham Maslow. But the point here is that when we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be the reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, "Sex and the City," or maybe watching funny videos of cats. So this is something you have to recognize. So what should we do about it? Well I say we have to stop thinking about the number of iPods per capita and start thinking about ways in which we can empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and then the members of civil society. Because even what has been happening up 'til now with the Spinternet and authoritarian deliberation, there is a great chance that those voices will not be heard. So I think we should shatter some of our utopian assumptions and actually start doing something about it. Thank you. (Applause)

How I harnessed the wind

{0: 'To power his family\'s home, young William Kamkwamba built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap -- starting him on a journey detailed in the book and film "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind."'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Thank you. Two years ago, I stood on the TED stage in Arusha, Tanzania. I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations. It was a simple machine that changed my life. Before that time, I had never been away from my home in Malawi. I had never used a computer. I had never seen an Internet. On the stage that day, I was so nervous. My English lost, I wanted to vomit. (Laughter) I had never been surrounded by so many azungu, white people. (Laughter) There was a story I wouldn't tell you then. But well, I'm feeling good right now. I would like to share that story today. We have seven children in my family. All sisters, excepting me. This is me with my dad when I was a little boy. Before I discovered the wonders of science, I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers. Like everyone else, we grew maize. One year our fortune turned very bad. In 2001 we experienced an awful famine. Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death. My family ate one meal per day, at night. Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us. The food passes through our bodies. We drop down to nothing. In Malawi, the secondary school, you have to pay school fees. Because of the hunger, I was forced to drop out of school. I looked at my father and looked at those dry fields. It was the future I couldn't accept. I felt very happy to be at the secondary school, so I was determined to do anything possible to receive education. So I went to a library. I read books, science books, especially physics. I couldn't read English that well. I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them. Another book put that knowledge in my hands. It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity. Pump water meant irrigation, a defense against hunger, which we were experiencing by that time. So I decided I would build one windmill for myself. But I didn't have materials to use, so I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials. Many people, including my mother, said I was crazy. (Laughter) I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo, I built my machine. It was one light at first. And then four lights, with switches, and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric bell. Another machine pumps water for irrigation. Queues of people start lining up at my house (Laughter) to charge their mobile phone. (Applause) I could not get rid of them. (Laughter) And the reporters came too, which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED. I had never seen an airplane before. I had never slept in a hotel. So, on stage that day in Arusha, my English lost, I said something like, "I tried. And I made it." So I would like to say something to all the people out there like me to the Africans, and the poor who are struggling with your dreams. God bless. Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet. I say to you, trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don't give up. Thank you. (Applause)

Photographs of secret sites

{0: 'With a large-format camera and a knack for talking her way into forbidden zones, Taryn Simon photographs portions of the American infrastructure inaccessible to its inhabitants.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site. And it read — I'm just going to read a key sentence: "Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to." Photography threatens fantasy. They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented. Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge. It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. And the outsider can never really reach the core. I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. It's titled, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. In this context I'll just show you a few. This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here. And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts. This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever. This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity. This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. This process costs 60,000 dollars. This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. There is a pig's head and African cane rats. And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. I do take certain liberties and intervene. And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items. This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism. This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene. This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. It's a research crop marijuana grow room. And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things — they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security — and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed. These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed. This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (Laughter) And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. And Playboy is always in the top few. (Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter) This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film. All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding — that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother — to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. It's a very violent process that is little known. And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities. This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. This is the Death Star. And it's shown here in its true orientation. In the context of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," its mirror image is presented. They flip the negative. And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. (Laughter) This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. It's called the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. And I put them into my photograph. This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity. And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq. Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. It's titled "The Innocents." And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes. I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change. I'll give you an example from a case. A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory. Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications. Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. And he served 10 years of a life sentence. Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph. Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. He served 18 years of a death sentence. I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography. Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas. Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array. Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. He is photographed at his alibi location. Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator. Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago. William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky. Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim. Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified. Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. That's it. Thank you. (Applause)

A third way to think about aid

{0: 'Jacqueline Novogratz works to enable human flourishing. Her organization, Acumen, invests in people, companies and ideas that see capital and networks as means, not ends, to solving the toughest issues of poverty.'}

TED@State

Clearly, we're living in a moment of crisis. Arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us, and yet I stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive. Because of some of technologies we've been talking about. Because of the resources, the skills, and certainly the surge of talent we're seeing all around the world, with the mindset to create change. And we've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen, who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower, but that we've got to engage in a different way with the world. And by definition, every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul, a global citizen. You work on the front lines. And you've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another. And no matter what country you live or work in, you've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of, even in their most ordinariness. Today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty, how best we release their energies. On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. And what I want to talk about is something that compliments both systems. We call it patient capital. The critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in Africa since 1970 and say, and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty, rampant corruption? They use Mobutu as metaphor. And their policy prescription is to make government more accountable, focus on the capital markets, invest, don't give anything away. On the other side, as I said, there are those who say the problem is that we need more money. That when it comes to the rich, we'll bail out and we'll hand a lot of aid, but when it comes to our poor brethren, we want little to do with it. They point to the successes of aid: the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals. Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves. After 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation, it's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people. They must navigate markets daily, making micro-decisions, dozens and dozens, to move their way through society, and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family, they could be put back into poverty, sometimes for generations. And so we need both the market and we need aid. Patient capital works between, and tries to take the best of both. It's money that's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity, but as individual customers, consumers, clients, people who want to make decisions in their own lives. Patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk, a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment, to use the market as the best listening device that we have, and the expectation of below-market returns, but outsized social impact. It recognizes that the market has its limitation, and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people. Now, entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons. First, they tend to work in markets where people make one, two, three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level. Second, the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure — no roads to speak of, sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption. Third, they are often creating markets. Even if you're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages, it is something new. And so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience. It also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance. Not only to build the systems, the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way, but to connect those business to other markets, to governments, to corporations — real partnerships if we want to get to scale. I want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation. In 2002 I met this incredible entrepreneur named Amitabha Sadangi from India, who'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet. And he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether, despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in India make under a dollar a day. They were creating subsidies either for large farms, or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use, rather than that the farmers wanted to use. At the same time Amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in Israel. It was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant. And it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green. But the market also had bypassed low income farmers, because these systems were both too expensive, and they were constructed for fields that were too large. The average small village farmer works on two acres or less. And so, Amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves, because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have. And he used three fundamental principles. The first one was miniaturization. The drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre, even if he had two, because it was too frightening, given all that he had at stake. Second, it had to be extremely affordable. In other words, that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest, or else they wouldn't take the risk. And third, it had to be what Amitabha calls infinitely expandable. What I mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre, the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth. As of today, IDE India, Amitabha's organization, has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average, but this didn't happen overnight. In fact, when you go back to the beginning, there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day, that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors, agriculture. And so we needed grants. And he used significant grants to research, to experiment, to fail, to innovate and try again. And when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers, that's when patient capital could come in. And we helped him build a company, for profit, that would build on IDE's knowledge, and start looking at sales and exports, and be able to tap into other kinds of capital. Secondarily, we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries. And so we met Dr. Sono Khangharani in Pakistan. And while, again, you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in India into Pakistan, just to get the permits, over time we were able to start a company with Dr. Sono, who runs a large community development organization in the Thar Desert, which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country. And though that company has just started, our assumption is that there too we'll see the impact on millions. But drip irrigation isn't the only innovation. We're starting to see these happening all around the world. In Arusha, Tanzania, A to Z Textile Manufacturing has worked in partnership with us, with UNICEF, with the Global Fund, to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people, mostly women. And they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for Africans around the world. Lifespring Hospital is a joint venture between Acumen and the government of India to bring quality, affordable maternal health care to low-income women, and it's been so successful that it's currently building a new hospital every 35 days. And 1298 Ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry, building an ambulance service in Bombay that would use the technology of Google Earth, a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access, and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption. So that in the terrorist attacks of November they were the first responder, and are now beginning to scale, because of partnership. They've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances, and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in India. This idea of scale is critical. Because we're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ones I discussed have reached at least a quarter million people. But that's obviously not enough. And it's where the idea of partnership becomes so important. Whether it's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets, government itself, or partner with major corporations, there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation. President Obama understands that. He recently authorized the creation of a Social Innovation Fund to focus on what works in this country, and look at how we can scale it. And I would submit that it's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations, not only for their country, but ones that we can use in the developed world as well. Invest financial assistance, but also management assistance. And then measure the returns, both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective. When we think about new approaches to aid, it's impossible not to talk about Pakistan. We've had a rocky relationship with that country and, in all fairness, the United States has not always been a very reliable partner. But again I would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen. And if we take that notion of a global innovation fund, we could use this time to invest not directly in government, though we would have government's blessing, nor in international experts, but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country. People like Rashani Zafar, who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country, and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country. And Tasneem Siddiqui, who developed a way called incremental housing, where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe, affordable community housing. Educational initiatives like DIL and The Citizen Foundation that are building schools across the country. It's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the Taliban. I've invested in Pakistan for over seven years now, and those of you who've also worked there can attest that Pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population, and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature. President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true. That these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of Pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day, provide real pathways to hope. And as we think about how we construct aid for Pakistan, while we need to strengthen the judiciary, build greater stability, we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world. On one of my last visits to Pakistan, I asked Dr. Sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the Thar Desert. And we left Karachi one morning before dawn. It was about 115 degrees. And we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color, lots of heat, very little discussion, because we were exhausted. And finally, at the end of the journey, I could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon. And as we got closer, its significance became apparent. That there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall. Because one of the poorest farmers on Earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life. His name was Raja, and he had kind, twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father. And he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he hadn't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day. Because he was building these crops. And with the money he earned he could stay this year. And for the first time ever in three generations, his children would go to school. We asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons. And he said, "Of course I will. Because I don't want them discriminated against anymore." When we think about solutions to poverty, we cannot deny individuals their fundamental dignity. Because at the end of the day, dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. And what's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity. Because that is where dignity really starts. Martin Luther King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental, and that power without love is reckless and abusive. Our generation has seen both approaches tried, and often fail. But I think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power. For that is what we'll need, as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us, and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet. The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions, a cross sector, is now. I can only talk from my own experience, but in eight years of running Acumen fund, I've seen the power of patient capital. Not only to inspire innovation and risk taking, but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet. I know it works. But I know that many other kinds of innovation also work. And so I urge you, in whatever sector you work, in whatever job you do, to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we're trying to help. Rather than what we think that they might need. It will take embracing the world with both arms. And it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability, with a sense of integrity and perseverance. And yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations. And there is so much good that we can do. Just think of all those sunflowers in the desert. Thank you. (Applause)

Mapping the future of countries

{0: 'Geopolitical futurist Parag Khanna foresees a world in which megacities, supply chains and connective technologies redraw the map away from states and borders.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Do we live in a borderless world? Before you answer that, have a look at this map. Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today. That's probably more than at any time in centuries. Now, many of you will object. For you this would be a more appropriate map. You could call it TEDistan. In TEDistan, there are no borders, just connected spaces and unconnected spaces. Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen, of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy. But let's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born. For them, nations, countries, boundaries, borders still matter a great deal, and often violently. Now here at TED, we're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe. Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved: our basic political geography. How do we distribute ourselves around the world? Now this is important, because border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. Border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here. So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion, culture, technology interact to change the map of the world. And we can try to anticipate those changes, and shape them in a more constructive direction. So we're going to look at some maps of the past, the present and some maps you haven't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going. Let's start with the world of 1945. 1945 there were just 100 countries in the world. After World War II, Europe was devastated, but still held large overseas colonies: French West Africa, British East Africa, South Asia, and so forth. Then over the late '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, waves of decolonization took place. Over 50 new countries were born. You can see that Africa has been fragmented. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South East Asian nations created. Then came the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans, and the 'stans of central Asia. Today we have 200 countries in the world. The entire planet is covered by sovereign, independent nation-states. Does that mean that someone's gain has to be someone else's loss? Let's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world, Eastern Eurasia. As you can see on this map, Russia is still the largest country in the world. And as you know, China is the most populous. And they share a lengthy land border. What you don't see on this map is that most of Russia's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe. And only 30 million people are in its eastern areas. In fact, the World Bank predicts that Russia's population is declining towards about 120 million people And there is another thing that you don't see on this map. Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags, labor camps, nuclear cities, whatever the case was. But as oil prices rose, Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country, east and west. But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia's demographic distribution, because the people in the east, who never wanted to be there anyway, have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west. As a result, in the Russian far east today, which is twice the size of India, you have exactly six million Russians. So let's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. Why do they call it that? Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines — copper, zinc, gold — and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. China isn't conquering Mongolia. It's buying it. Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought. So let's apply this principle to Siberia. Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold, desolate, unlivable place. But in fact, with global warming and rising temperatures, all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness, and grain being produced in Siberia. But who is it going to feed? Well, just on the other side of the Amo River, in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China, you have over 100 million people. That's larger than the entire population of Russia. Every single year, for at least a decade or more, [60,000] of them have been voting with their feet, crossing, moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain. They set up their own bazaars and medical clinics. They've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east, back into China. Again, like Mongolia, China isn't conquering Russia. It's just leasing it. That's what I call globalization Chinese style. Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years. But hold on. This map is 700 years old. This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty, led by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. So history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This is just to give you a taste of what's happening in this part of the world. Again, globalization Chinese style. Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography. So, the history of East Asia in fact, people don't think about nations and borders. They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies, usually Chinese or Japanese. Well it's China's turn again. So let's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East. It starts with the global hubs. Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy? East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sidney. These are the filters and funnels of global capital. Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region, so much of it being invested into China. Then there is trade. These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region. Specifically, it targets Japan and Korea and Australia, countries that are strong allies of the United States. Australia, for example, is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to China. For poorer countries, China reduces tariffs so that Laos and Cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to China as well. And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound, the economic rebound, not just in Asia, but potentially for the world. The Asian free trade zone, almost free trade zone, that's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific. So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region. Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy. China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region. It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community. Some of these organizations don't even have the United States as a member. There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries, such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States, most countries vow to just sit it out, including American allies like Korea and Australia. Another pillar of the strategy, like Russia, is demographic. China exports business people, nannies, students, teachers to teach Chinese around the region, to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies. Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there. Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result. Singapore, for example, used to ban Chinese language education. Now it encourages it. If you add it all up what do you get? Well, if you remember before World War II, Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere. What's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere. So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders, what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures, but in a much more fluid, imperial zone. All of this is happening without firing a shot. That's most certainly not the case in the Middle East where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by European colonialists. So what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world? What lines on the map should we focus on? What I want to present to you is what I call state building, day by day. Let's start with Iraq. Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality. Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together; now it is the most significant cause of the country's disintegration. The reason is Kurdistan. The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence, and now is their chance to finally have it. These are pipeline routes, which emerge from Kurdistan, which is an oil-rich region. And today, if you go to Kurdistan, you'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army. But what are they guarding? Is it really a border on the map? No. It's the pipelines. If the Kurds can control their pipelines, they can set the terms of their own statehood. Now should we be upset about this, about the potential disintegration of Iraq? I don't believe we should. Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. And we'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute. Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked. It has no choice but to behave. In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria, and other countries, and Iraq itself. And therefore it has to have amicable relations with them. Now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region. That is, of course, in Palestine. Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it's two parts Palestinian, one part Israel. 30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict. What might? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure. Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this. These two arrows are an arc, an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza. If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank, you can have a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian economy. That, I believe, is going to bring peace to this particular conflict. The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone, without infrastructure, is futile. Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders, when the insecurities might abate? The last time that was the case was actually a century ago, during the Ottoman Empire. This is the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway ran from Istanbul to Medina via Damascus. It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. But today the Hejaz Railway lies in tatters, ruins. If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map, infrastructure, that cross the straight lines, the borders, I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region. Now let's look at another part of the world, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, the 'stans. These countries' borders originate from Stalin's decrees. He purposely did not want these countries to make sense. He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule. Fortunately for them, most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the Soviet Union collapsed. Now I know some of you may be thinking, "Oil, oil, oil. Why is it all he's talking about is oil?" Well, there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we're talking about it now. Before it was, how do we control their oil? Now it's their oil for their own purposes. And I assure you it's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists. Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades. A great deal of them. For a number of countries in this part of the world, having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves. Just take Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses, but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey, it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west. Then there is Turkmenistan, which most people think of as a frozen basket case. But now it's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe, and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well. Then there is Kazakhstan, which didn't even have a name before. It was more considered South Siberia during the Soviet Union. Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player. Why? Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian, north through Russia, and even east to China. More pipelines means more silk roads, instead of the Great Game. The Great Game connotes dominance of one over the other. Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust. The more pipelines we have, the more silk roads we'll have, and the less of a dominant Great Game competition we'll have in the 21st century. Now let's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders, and how that has enhanced its strength. And that is, of course, Europe. The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries, and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way. But then eventually it grew into 12 countries, and those are the 12 stars on the European flag. The E.U. also became a currency block, and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world. On average, the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War. In fact most of that happened on just one day. In 2004, 15 new countries joined the E.U. and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people. So what is next? What is the future of the European Union? Well in light blue, you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment. What does that tell us? Trade and investment tell us that Europe is putting its money where its mouth is. Even if these regions aren't part of the E.U., they are becoming part of its sphere of influence. Just take the Balkans. Croatia, Serbia Bosnia, they're not members of the E.U. yet. But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania. In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already, and that's the only currency they're probably ever going to have. So, looking at other parts of Europe's periphery, such as North Africa. On average, every year or two, a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean, connecting North Africa to Europe. That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy, but if you travel to North Africa today, you'll hear more and more people saying that they don't really think of their region as the Middle East. So in other words, I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union. Now let's look at Turkey and the Caucasus. I mentioned Azerbaijan before. That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe's energy supply. So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union? I don't think it does. I think it's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower. So what's next? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born? Well, South Central Asia, South West Asia is a very good place to start. Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability. Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism. This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border. Let's not neglect the insurgency just to the south, Balochistan. Two weeks ago, Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison, and this was the flag that they raised over it. The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating, and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment. Of course, we can't forget Africa. 53 countries, and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map. If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more, tribal divisions and so forth. But let's just look at Sudan, the second-largest country in Africa. It has three ongoing civil wars, the genocide in Darfur, which you all know about, the civil war in the east of the country, and south Sudan. South Sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence. Now let's go up to the Arctic Circle. There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed. Who will win? Canada? Russia? The United States? Actually Greenland. Several weeks ago Greenland's [60,000] people voted themselves self-governance rights from Denmark. So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller. What is the lesson from all of this? Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline. It's constantly morphing and changing the world, like climate change. And like our relationship with the ecosystem we're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet. Now we fear changes on the map. We fear civil wars, death tolls, having to learn the names of new countries. But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent. The question is how do we change those borders, and what lines do we focus on? I believe we focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructure lines. Then we'll wind up with the world we want, a borderless one. Thank you. (Applause)

Designers -- think big!

{0: 'Tim Brown is the CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO -- taking an approach to design that digs deeper than the surface.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'd like to talk a little bit this morning about what happens if we move from design to design thinking. Now this rather old photo up there is actually the first project I was ever hired to do, something like 25 years ago. It's a woodworking machine, or at least a piece of one, and my task was to make this thing a little bit more modern, a little bit easier to use. I thought, at the time, I did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, not very long afterwards the company went out of business. This is the second project that I did. It's a fax machine. I put an attractive shell around some new technology. Again, 18 months later, the product was obsolete. And now, of course, the whole technology is obsolete. Now, I'm a fairly slow learner, but eventually it occurred to me that maybe what passed for design wasn't all that important — making things more attractive, making them a bit easier to use, making them more marketable. By focusing on a design, maybe just a single product, I was being incremental and not having much of an impact. But I think this small view of design is a relatively recent phenomenon, and in fact really emerged in the latter half of the 20th century as design became a tool of consumerism. So when we talk about design today, and particularly when we read about it in the popular press, we're often talking about products like these. Amusing? Yes. Desirable? Maybe. Important? Not so very. But this wasn't always the way. And I'd like to suggest that if we take a different view of design, and focus less on the object and more on design thinking as an approach, that we actually might see the result in a bigger impact. Now this gentleman, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designed many great things in his career in the 19th century, including the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol and the Thames tunnel at Rotherhithe. Both great designs and actually very innovative too. His greatest creation runs actually right through here in Oxford. It's called the Great Western Railway. And as a kid I grew up very close to here, and one of my favorite things to do was to cycle along by the side of the railway waiting for the great big express trains to roar past. You can see it represented here in J.M.W. Turner's painting, "Rain, Steam and Speed". Now, what Brunel said that he wanted to achieve for his passengers was the experience of floating across the countryside. Now, this was back in the 19th century. And to do that meant creating the flattest gradients that had ever yet been made, which meant building long viaducts across river valleys — this is actually the viaduct across the Thames at Maidenhead — and long tunnels such as the one at Box, in Wiltshire. But he didn't stop there. He didn't stop with just trying to design the best railway journey. He imagined an integrated transportation system in which it would be possible for a passenger to embark on a train in London and disembark from a ship in New York. One journey from London to New York. This is the S.S. Great Western that he built to take care of the second half of that journey. Now, Brunel was working 100 years before the emergence of the design profession, but I think he was using design thinking to solve problems and to create world-changing innovations. Now, design thinking begins with what Roger Martin, the business school professor at the University of Toronto, calls integrative thinking. And that's the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. In the case of design, that means balancing desirability, what humans need, with technical feasibility, and economic viability. With innovations like the Great Western, we can stretch that balance to the absolute limit. So somehow, we went from this to this. Systems thinkers who were reinventing the world, to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things. As our industrial society matured, so design became a profession and it focused on an ever smaller canvas until it came to stand for aesthetics, image and fashion. Now I'm not trying to throw stones here. I'm a fully paid-up member of that priesthood, and somewhere in here I have my designer glasses. There we go. But I do think that perhaps design is getting big again. And that's happening through the application of design thinking to new kinds of problems — to global warming, to education, healthcare, security, clean water, whatever. And as we see this reemergence of design thinking and we see it beginning to tackle new kinds of problems, there are some basic ideas that I think we can observe that are useful. And I'd like to talk about some of those just for the next few minutes. The first of those is that design is human-centered. It may integrate technology and economics, but it starts with what humans need, or might need. What makes life easier, more enjoyable? What makes technology useful and usable? But that is more than simply good ergonomics, putting the buttons in the right place. It's often about understanding culture and context before we even know where to start to have ideas. So when a team was working on a new vision screening program in India, they wanted to understand what the aspirations and motivations were of these school children to understand how they might play a role in screening their parents. Conversion Sound has developed a high quality, ultra-low-cost digital hearing aid for the developing world. Now, in the West we rely on highly trained technicians to fit these hearing aids. In places like India, those technicians simply don't exist. So it took a team working in India with patients and community health workers to understand how a PDA and an application on a PDA might replace those technicians in a fitting and diagnostic service. Instead of starting with technology, the team started with people and culture. So if human need is the place to start, then design thinking rapidly moves on to learning by making. Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think. Now, prototypes speed up the process of innovation, because it is only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve. Now, much has been said and written about the Aravind Eye Institute in Madurai, India. They do an incredible job of serving very poor patients by taking the revenues from those who can afford to pay to cross-subsidize those who cannot. Now, they are very efficient, but they are also very innovative. When I visited them a few years ago, what really impressed me was their willingness to prototype their ideas very early. This is the manufacturing facility for one of their biggest cost breakthroughs. They make their own intraocular lenses. These are the lenses that replace those that are damaged by cataracts. And I think it's partly their prototyping mentality that really allowed them to achieve the breakthrough. Because they brought the cost down from $200 a pair, down to just $4 a pair. Partly they did this by instead of building a fancy new factory, they used the basement of one of their hospitals. And instead of installing the large-scale machines used by western producers, they used low-cost CAD/CAM prototyping technology. They are now the biggest manufacturer of these lenses in the developing world and have recently moved into a custom factory. So if human need is the place to start, and prototyping, a vehicle for progress, then there are also some questions to ask about the destination. Instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption, design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation — the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful, productive and profitable. So I'd like to take the idea that Rory Sutherland talked about, this notion that intangible things are worth perhaps more than physical things, and take that a little bit further and say that I think the design of participatory systems, in which many more forms of value beyond simply cash are both created and measured, is going to be the major theme, not only for design, but also for our economy as we go forward. So William Beveridge, when he wrote the first of his famous reports in 1942, created what became Britain's welfare state in which he hoped that every citizen would be an active participant in their own social well-being. By the time he wrote his third report, he confessed that he had failed and instead had created a society of welfare consumers. Hilary Cottam, Charlie Leadbeater, and Hugo Manassei of Participle have taken this idea of participation, and in their manifesto entitled Beveridge 4.0, they are suggesting a framework for reinventing the welfare state. So in one of their projects called Southwark Circle, they worked with residents in Southwark, South London and a small team of designers to develop a new membership organization to help the elderly with household tasks. Designs were refined and developed with 150 older people and their families before the service was launched earlier this year. We can take this idea of participation perhaps to its logical conclusion and say that design may have its greatest impact when it's taken out of the hands of designers and put into the hands of everyone. Nurses and practitioners at U.S. healthcare system Kaiser Permanente study the topic of improving the patient experience, and particularly focused on the way that they exchange knowledge and change shift. Through a program of observational research, brainstorming new solutions and rapid prototyping, they've developed a completely new way to change shift. They went from retreating to the nurse's station to discuss the various states and needs of patients, to developing a system that happened on the ward in front of patients, using a simple software tool. By doing this they brought the time that they were away from patients down from 40 minutes to 12 minutes, on average. They increased patient confidence and nurse happiness. When you multiply that by all the nurses in all the wards in 40 hospitals in the system, it resulted, actually, in a pretty big impact. And this is just one of thousands of opportunities in healthcare alone. So these are just some of the kind of basic ideas around design thinking and some of the new kinds of projects that they're being applied to. But I'd like to go back to Brunel here, and suggest a connection that might explain why this is happening now, and maybe why design thinking is a useful tool. And that connection is change. In times of change we need new alternatives, new ideas. Now, Brunel worked at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when all of life and our economy was being reinvented. Now the industrial systems of Brunel's time have run their course, and indeed they are part of the problem today. But, again, we are in the midst of massive change. And that change is forcing us to question quite fundamental aspects of our society — how we keep ourselves healthy, how we govern ourselves, how we educate ourselves, how we keep ourselves secure. And in these times of change, we need these new choices because our existing solutions are simply becoming obsolete. So why design thinking? Because it gives us a new way of tackling problems. Instead of defaulting to our normal convergent approach where we make the best choice out of available alternatives, it encourages us to take a divergent approach, to explore new alternatives, new solutions, new ideas that have not existed before. But before we go through that process of divergence, there is actually quite an important first step. And that is, what is the question that we're trying to answer? What's the design brief? Now Brunel may have asked a question like this, "How do I take a train from London to New York?" But what are the kinds of questions that we might ask today? So these are some that we've been asked to think about recently. And one in particular, is one that we're working on with the Acumen Fund, in a project that's been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. How might we improve access to safe drinking water for the world's poorest people, and at the same time stimulate innovation amongst local water providers? So instead of having a bunch of American designers come up with new ideas that may or may not have been appropriate, we took a sort of more open, collaborative and participative approach. We teamed designers and investment experts up with 11 water organizations across India. And through workshops they developed innovative new products, services, and business models. We hosted a competition and then funded five of those organizations to develop their ideas. So they developed and iterated these ideas. And then IDEO and Acumen spent several weeks working with them to help design new social marketing campaigns, community outreach strategies, business models, new water vessels for storing water and carts for delivering water. Some of those ideas are just getting launched into the market. And the same process is just getting underway with NGOs in East Africa. So for me, this project shows kind of how far we can go from some of those sort of small things that I was working on at the beginning of my career. That by focusing on the needs of humans and by using prototypes to move ideas along quickly, by getting the process out of the hands of designers, and by getting the active participation of the community, we can tackle bigger and more interesting questions. And just like Brunel, by focusing on systems, we can have a bigger impact. So that's one thing that we've been working on. I'm actually really quite interested, and perhaps more interested to know what this community thinks we could work on. What kinds of questions do we think design thinking could be used to tackle? And if you've got any ideas then feel free, you can post them to Twitter. There is a hash tag there that you can use, #CBDQ. And the list looked something like this a little while ago. And of course you can search to find the questions that you're interested in by using the same hash code. So I'd like to believe that design thinking actually can make a difference, that it can help create new ideas and new innovations, beyond the latest High Street products. To do that I think we have to take a more expansive view of design, more like Brunel, less a domain of a professional priesthood. And the first step is to start asking the right questions. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Let's revive the Golden Rule

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

TEDGlobal 2009

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

How spectroscopy could reveal alien life

{0: "Garik Israelian's stargazing on the Canary Islands has led to high-profile discoveries about space's big disasters -- including the first evidence that supernova explosions make black holes. \r\n"}

TEDGlobal 2009

I have a very difficult task. I'm a spectroscopist. I have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies, etc. because my job is spectroscopy. I never deal with images. But I'll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world. Spectroscopy can probably answer the question, "Is there anybody out there?" Are we alone? SETI. It's not very fun to do spectroscopy. One of my colleagues in Bulgaria, Nevena Markova, spent about 20 years studying these profiles. And she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject. Can you imagine? Day and night, thinking, observing, the same star for 20 years is incredible. But we are crazy. We do these things. (Laughter) And I'm not that far. I spent about eight months working on these profiles. Because I've noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars. And I thought, well maybe there is Lithium-6 in this star, which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet. Because apparently you can't have this fragile isotope of Lithium-6 in the atmospheres of sun-like stars. But you have it in planets and asteroids. So if you engulf planet or large number of asteroids, you will have this Lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star. So I invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star. And actually it's amazing, because I got phone calls from many reporters asking, "Have you actually seen the planet going into a star?" Because they thought that if you are having a telescope, you are an astronomer so what you are doing is actually looking in a telescope. And you might have seen the planet going into a star. And I was saying, "No, excuse me. What I see is this one." (Laughter) It's just incredible. Because nobody understood really. I bet that there were very few people who really understood what I'm talking about. Because this is the indication that the planet went into the star. It's amazing. The power of spectroscopy was actually realized by Pink Floyd already in 1973. (Laughter) Because they actually said that you can get any color you like in a spectrum. And all you need is time and money to make your spectrograph. This is the number one high resolution, most precise spectrograph on this planet, called HARPS, which is actually used to detect extrasolar planets and sound waves in the atmospheres of stars. How we get spectra? I'm sure most of you know from school physics that it's basically splitting a white light into colors. And if you have a liquid hot mass, it will produce something which we call a continuous spectrum. A hot gas is producing emission lines only, no continuum. And if you place a cool gas in front of a hot source, you will see certain patterns which we call absorption lines. Which is used actually to identify chemical elements in a cool matter, which is absorbing exactly at those frequencies. Now, what we can do with the spectra? We can actually study line-of-sight velocities of cosmic objects. And we can also study chemical composition and physical parameters of stars, galaxies, nebulae. A star is the most simple object. In the core, we have thermonuclear reactions going on, creating chemical elements. And we have a cool atmosphere. It's cool for me. Cool in my terms is three or four or five thousand degrees. My colleagues in infra-red astronomy call minus 200 Kelvin is cool for them. But you know, everything is relative. So for me 5,000 degrees is pretty cool. (Laughter) This is the spectrum of the Sun — 24,000 spectral lines, and about 15 percent of these lines is not yet identified. It is amazing. So we are in the 21st century, and we still cannot properly understand the spectrum of the sun. Sometimes we have to deal with just one tiny, weak spectral line to measure the composition of that chemical element in the atmosphere. For instance, you see the spectral line of the gold is the only spectral line in the spectrum of the Sun. And we use this weak feature to measure the composition of gold in the atmosphere of the Sun. And now this is a work in progress. We have been dealing with a similarly very weak feature, which belongs to osmium. It's a heavy element produced in thermonuclear explosions of supernovae. It's the only place where you can produce, actually, osmium. Just comparing the composition of osmium in one of the planet host stars, we want to understand why there is so much of this element. Perhaps we even think that maybe supernova explosions trigger formations of planets and stars. It can be an indication. The other day, my colleague from Berkeley, Gibor Basri, emailed me a very interesting spectrum, asking me, "Can you have a look at this?" And I couldn't sleep, next two weeks, when I saw the huge amount of oxygen and other elements in the spectrum of the stars. I knew that there is nothing like that observed in the galaxy. It was incredible. The only conclusion we could make from this is clear evidence that there was a supernova explosion in this system, which polluted the atmosphere of this star. And later a black hole was formed in a binary system, which is still there with a mass of about five solar masses. This was considered as first evidence that actually black holes come from supernovae explosions. My colleagues, comparing composition of chemical elements in different galactic stars, actually discovered alien stars in our galaxy. It's amazing that you can go so far simply studying the chemical composition of stars. They actually said that one of the stars you see in the spectra is an alien. It comes from a different galaxy. There is interaction of galaxies. We know this. And sometimes they just capture stars. You've heard about solar flares. We were very surprised to discover a super flare, a flare which is thousands of millions of times more powerful than those we see in the Sun. In one of the binary stars in our galaxy called FH Leo, we discovered the super flare. And later we went to study the spectral stars to see is there anything strange with these objects. And we found that everything is normal. These stars are normal like the Sun. Age, everything was normal. So this is a mystery. It's one of the mysteries we still have, super flares. And there are six or seven similar cases reported in the literature. Now to go ahead with this, we really need to understand chemical evolution of the universe. It's very complicated. I don't really want you to try to understand what is here. (Laughter) But it's to show you how complicated is the whole story of the production of chemical elements. You have two channels — the massive stars and low-mass stars — producing and recycling matter and chemical elements in the universe. And doing this for 14 billion years, we end up with this picture, which is a very important graph, showing relative abundances of chemical elements in sun-like stars and in the interstellar medium. So which means that it's really impossible to find an object where you find about 10 times more sulfur than silicon, five times more calcium than oxygen. It's just impossible. And if you find one, I will say that this is something related to SETI, because naturally you can't do it. Doppler Effect is something very important from fundamental physics. And this is related to the change of the frequency of a moving source. The Doppler Effect is used to discover extrasolar planets. The precision which we need to discover a Jupiter-like planet around a sun-like star is something like 28.4 meters per second. And we need nine centimeters per second to detect an Earth-like planet. This can be done with the future spectrographs. I, myself, I'm actually involved in the team which is developing a CODEX, high resolution, future generation spectrograph for the 42 meter E-ELT telescope. And this is going to be an instrument to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars. It is an amazing tool called astroseismology where we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of stars. This is the sound of an Alpha Cen. We can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of sun-like stars. Those waves have frequencies in infrasound domain, the sound actually nobody knows, domain. Coming back to the most important question, "Is there anybody out there?" This is closely related to tectonic and volcanic activity of planets. Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward. No life without tectonic activity, without volcanic activity. And we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium. How to measure, if we have planets where the amount of those elements is small, so those planets are tectonically dead, there cannot be life. If there is too much uranium or potassium or thorium, probably, again, there would be no life. Because can you imagine everything boiling? It's too much energy on a planet. Now, we have been measuring abundance of thorium in one of the stars with extrasolar planets. It's exactly the same game. A very tiny feature. We are actually trying to measure this profile and to detect thorium. It's very tough. It's very tough. And you have to, first you have to convince yourself. Then you have to convince your colleagues. And then you have to convince the whole world that you have actually detected something like this in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet host star somewhere in 100 parsec away from here. It's really difficult. But if you want to know about a life on extrasolar planets, you have to do this job. Because you have to know how much of radioactive element you have in those systems. The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals. If you receive something interesting, well that's what SETI does actually, what SETI has been doing for many years. I think the most promising way is to go for biomarkers. You can see the spectrum of the Earth, this Earthshine spectrum, and that is a very clear signal. The slope which is coming, which we call a Red Edge, is a detection of vegetated area. It's amazing that we can detect vegetation from a spectrum. Now imagine doing this test for other planets. Now very recently, very recently, I'm talking about last six, seven, eight months, water, methane, carbon dioxide have been detected in the spectrum of a planet outside the solar system. It's amazing. So this is the power of spectroscopy. You can actually go and detect and study a chemical composition of planets far, far, far from solar system. We have to detect oxygen or ozone to make sure that we have all necessary conditions to have life. Cosmic miracles are something which can be related to SETI. Now imagine an object, amazing object, or something which we cannot explain when we just stand up and say, "Look, we give up. Physics doesn't work." So it's something which you can always refer to SETI and say, "Well, somebody must be doing this, somehow." And with the known physics etc, it's something actually which has been pointed out by Frank Drake, many years ago, and Shklovsky. If you see, in the spectrum of a planet host star, if you see strange chemical elements, it can be a signal from a civilization which is there and they want to signal about it. They want to actually signal their presence through these spectral lines, in the spectrum of a star, in different ways. There can be different ways doing this. One is, for instance, technetium is a radioactive element with a decay time of 4.2 million years. If you suddenly observe technetium in a sun-like star, you can be sure that somebody has put this element in the atmosphere, because in a natural way it is impossible to do this. Now we are reviewing the spectra of about 300 stars with extrasolar planets. And we are doing this job since 2000 and it's a very heavy project. We have been working very hard. And we have some interesting cases, candidates, so on, things which we can't really explain. And I hope in the near future we can confirm this. So the main question: "Are we alone?" I think it will not come from UFOs. It will not come from radio signals. I think it will come from a spectrum like this. It is the spectrum of a planet like Earth, showing a presence of nitrogen dioxide, as a clear signal of life, and oxygen and ozone. If, one day, and I think it will be within 15 years from now, or 20 years. If we discover a spectrum like this we can be sure that there is life on that planet. In about five years we will discover planets like Earth, around sun-like stars, the same distance as the Earth from the Sun. It will take about five years. And then we will need another 10, 15 years with space projects to get the spectra of Earth-like planets like the one I showed you. And if we see the nitrogen dioxide and oxygen, I think we have the perfect E.T. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The power of time off

{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.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years, I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time. I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year. Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two. There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time, there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it. I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was. It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society. I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter) Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It's not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made peace with those dogs. (Laughter) Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It's called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it. Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals. This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations. If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects. Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That's about five percent of everybody. So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it. When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter) In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. So I became my own intern. (Laughter) And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing; 9 to 10: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices. And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else. We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo. So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. That's connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy, because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same. So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title. And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program, as well as educational services. Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both salespeople. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "Things I've Learned in My Life So Far." I'll just show two now. This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, "Self-confidence produces fine results." This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter) And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250,000 coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better." And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, "Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?" While we built all this up during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police. And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter) We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It's a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really get done properly. That film we'll be working on for the next two years. So it's going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile. Then you can of course always go and see this guy. Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)

How food shapes our cities

{0: 'Food is a shared necessity -- but also a shared way of thinking, argues Carolyn Steel. Looking at food networks offers an unusual and illuminating way to explore how cities evolved.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

How do you feed a city? It's one of the great questions of our time. Yet it's one that's rarely asked. We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere. But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all. We live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat, we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me — it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil — in order to feed us. These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them. And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals. And given that it takes three times as much grain — actually ten times as much grain — to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first, that's not a very efficient way of feeding us. And it's an escalating problem too. By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. And that's going to pose an enormous problem. Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are, it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve. Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. We're very hungry for fossil fuels too. It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don't actually value it. Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we're not even managing to feed the planet properly. A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense. And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it's a grim picture. As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. And if we look to the future, it's an unsustainable diet. So how did we get here? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. And it was also fertile. And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time. This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers. Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people. So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. And in fact, that's true of every ancient city. But of course not all of them were that small. Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. So how did a city like this feed itself? The answer is what I call "ancient food miles." Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. And the food obviously went off very quickly. So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. (Laughter) In fact — I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary. So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. So the grain markets were to the south of the city. And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets. And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. And the same of course was true for fish. Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing. And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port. This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. So much of London's meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London's very famous meat market, was located up there. Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside, that's where they were sold, which is why it's called Poultry. And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. But also you have to imagine it full of food. Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold. And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier. So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. And then 10 years later everything changed. This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. And they're coming into the city by rail. And this changes everything. To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography. And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. It's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all. And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week's worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely. Here we have food — that used to be the center, the social core of the city — at the periphery. It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. Now it's anonymous. We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something. We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat. We just read the back of a label on a packet. And we don't value food. We don't trust it. So instead of trusting it, we fear it. And instead of valuing it, we throw it away. One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable. So what are we going to do about that? It's not a new question. 500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself. This is the frontispiece of his book "Utopia." And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way. And here is another very famous "Utopian" vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, "The Garden City." Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had. And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian. Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek. It can either mean a good place, or no place. Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it. And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. So I've come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, "sitos" for food, and "topos" for place. I believe we already live in Sitopia. We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool — a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently. So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? Well I think it looks a bit like this. I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog. But anyway, this is — (Laughter) it's food at the center of life, at the center of family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. This is where food should be in our society. But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this. By the way, these can be men as well. It's people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. We need these people. We're part of a network. Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this. Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. It's common. It's fresh. It's part of the social life of the city. Because without that, you can't have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. Cows with a view. Steaming piles of humus. This is basically bringing the whole thing together. And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. It's a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know. But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important. So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. It's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. We're going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. But of course, that's not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. It's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives. The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good Government." It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside. And I think the message of this is very clear. If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? What would an allegory of good government look like today? Because I think it's an urgent question. It's one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. We know we are what we eat. We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Tribal leadership

{0: 'David Logan is a USC faculty member, best-selling author, and management consultant.'}

TEDxUSC

What we're really here to talk about is the "how." Okay, so how exactly do we create this world-shattering, if you will, innovation? Now, I want to tell you a quick story. We'll go back a little more than a year. In fact, the date — I'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date? It was February 3rd, 2008. Anyone remember what happened, February 3rd, 2008? Super Bowl. I heard it over here. It was the date of the Super Bowl. And the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, and I noticed as we began to debrief various Super Bowl parties, is that it seemed to us that across the United States, if you will, tribal councils had convened. And they had discussed things of great national importance. Like, "Do we like the Budweiser commercial?" and, "Do we like the nachos?" and, "Who is going to win?" But they also talked about which candidate they were going to support. And if you go back in time to February 3rd, it looked like Hilary Clinton was going to get the Democratic nomination. And there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way. But when we talked to people, it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the United States. Now what is a tribe? A tribe is a group of about 20 — so kind of more than a team — 20 to about 150 people. And it's within these tribes that all of our work gets done. But not just work. It's within these tribes that societies get built, that important things happen. And so as we surveyed the, if you will, representatives from various tribal councils that met, also known as Super Bowl parties, we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day. February 4th, we posted it on our website. This was before Super Tuesday. We said, "The tribes that we're in are saying it's going to be Obama." Now, the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes, studying these naturally occurring groups. All of you are members of tribes. In walking around at the break, many of you had met members of your tribe. And you were talking to them. And many of you were doing what great, if you will, tribal leaders do, which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe, and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe, and make introductions. That is in fact what great tribal leaders do. So here is the bottom line. If you focus in on a group like this — this happens to be a USC game — and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people, you would in fact see not a single crowd, just like there is not a single crowd here, but you would see these tribes that are then coming together. And from a distance it appears that it's a single group. And so people form tribes. They always have. They always will. Just as fish swim and birds fly, people form tribes. It's just what we do. But here's the rub. Not all tribes are the same, and what makes the difference is the culture. Now here is the net out of this. You're all a member of tribes. If you can find a way to take the tribes that you're in and nudge them forward, along these tribal stages to what we call Stage Five, which is the top of the mountain. But we're going to start with what we call Stage One. Now, this is the lowest of the stages. You don't want this. Okay? This is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen. But it's one that I think we need to learn from. Stage One produces people who do horrible things. This is the kid who shot up Virginia Tech. Stage One is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes, and then pool together with people who think like they do. Stage One is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons. Now, again, we don't often deal with Stage One. And I want to make the point that as members of society, we need to. It's not enough to simply write people off. But let's move on to Stage Two. Now, Stage One, you'll notice, says, in effect, "Life Sucks." So, this other book that Steve mentioned, that just came out, called "The Three Laws of Performance," my colleague, Steve Zaffron and I, argue that as people see the world, so they behave. Well, if people see the world in such a way that life sucks, then their behavior will follow automatically from that. It will be despairing hostility. They'll do whatever it takes to survive, even if that means undermining other people. Now, my birthday is coming up shortly, and my driver's license expires. And the reason that that's relevant is that very soon I will be walking into what we call a Stage Two tribe, which looks like this. (Laughter) Now, am I saying that in every Department of Motor Vehicles across the land, you find a Stage Two culture? No. But in the one near me, where I have to go in just a few days, what I will say when I'm standing in line is, "How can people be so dumb, and yet live?" (Laughter) Now, am I saying that there are dumb people working here? Actually, no, I'm not. But I'm saying the culture makes people dumb. So in a Stage Two culture — and we find these in all sorts of different places — you find them, in fact, in the best organizations in the world. You find them in all places in society. I've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class. But here is the point. If you believe and you say to people in your tribe, in effect, "My life sucks. I mean, if I got to go to TEDx USC my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does." If that's how you talked, imagine what kind of work would get done. What kind of innovation would get done? The amount of world-changing behavior that would happen? In fact it would be basically nil. Now when we go on to Stage Three: this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us. Because it is in Stage Three that many of us move. And we park. And we stay. Stage Three says, "I'm great. And you're not." (Laughter) I'm great and you're not. Now imagine having a whole room of people saying, in effect, "I'm great and you're not." Or, "I'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that." A whole group of people communicating that way, talking that way. I know this sounds like a joke. Three doctors walk into a bar. But, in this case, three doctors walk into an elevator. I happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book. And one doctor said to the others, "Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine?" And the other said, "No. That's great. Congratulations!" The next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said, "Well while you were, you know, doing your research," — notice the condescending tone — "While you were off doing your research, I was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution." And the third one got the same wry smile and said, "Well, while you were off doing your research, and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery, that eventually we'll train monkeys to do, or cells or robots, or maybe not even need to do it at all, I was off running the future of the residency program, which is really the future of medicine." And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back. And the elevator door opened, and they all walked out. That is a meeting of a Stage Three tribe. Now, we find these in places where really smart, successful people show up. Like, oh, I don't know, TEDx USC. (Laughter) Here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation. It is moving from Stage Three to Stage Four. Let's take a look at a quick video snippet. This is from a company called Zappos, located outside Las Vegas. And my question on the other side is just going to be, "What do you think they value?" It was not Christmas time. There was a Christmas tree. This is their lobby. Employees volunteer time in the advice booth. Notice it looks like something out of a Peanuts cartoon. Okay, we're going through the hallway here at Zappos. This is a call center. Notice how it's decorated. Notice people are applauding for us. They don't know who we are and they don't care. And if they did they probably wouldn't applaud. But you'll notice the level of excitement. Notice, again, how they decorate their office. Now, what's important to people at Zappos, these may not be the things that are important to you. But they value things like fun. And they value creativity. One of their stated values is, "Be a little bit weird." And you'll notice they are a little bit weird. So when individuals come together and find something that unites them that's greater than their individual competence, then something very important happens. The group gels. And it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger, into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence. Stage Four tribes can do remarkable things. But you'll notice we're not at the top of the mountain yet. There is, in fact, another stage. Now, some of you may not recognize the scene that's up here. And if you take a look at the headline of Stage Five, which is "Life is Great," this may seem a little incongruous. This is a scene or snippet from the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa for which Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize. Now think about that. South Africa, terrible atrocities had happened in the society. And people came together focused only on those two values: truth and reconciliation. There was no road map. No one had ever done anything like this before. And in this atmosphere, where the only guidance was people's values and their noble cause, what this group accomplished was historic. And people, at the time, feared that South Africa would end up going the way that Rwanda has gone, descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end. In fact, South Africa has not gone down that road. Largely because people like Desmond Tutu set up a Stage Five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country, to bring everyone together. So, people hear this and they conclude the following, as did we in doing the study. Okay, got it. I don't want to talk Stage One. That's like, you know, "Life sucks." Who wants to talk that way? I don't want to talk like they do at the particular DMV that's close to where Dave lives. I really don't want to just say "I'm great," because that kind of sounds narcissistic, and then I won't have any friends. Saying, "We're great" — that sounds pretty good. But I should really talk Stage Five, right? "Life is great." Well, in fact, there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this. The first one, if you look at the Declaration of Independence and actually read it, the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights. I mean, that's Stage Five, right? Life is great, oriented only by our values, no other guidance. In fact, most of the document is written at Stage Two. "My life sucks because I live under a tyrant, also known as King George. We're great! Who is not great? England!" Sorry. (Laughter) Well, what about other great leaders? What about Gandhi? What about Martin Luther King? I mean, surely these were just people who preached, "Life is great," right? Just one little bit of happiness and joy after another. In fact, Martin Luther King's most famous line was at Stage Three. He didn't say "We have a dream." He said, "I have a dream." Why did he do that? Because most people are not at Stage Five. Two percent are at Stage One. About 25 percent are at Stage Two, saying, in effect, "My life sucks." 48 percent of working tribes say, these are employed tribes, say, "I'm great and you're not." And we have to duke it out every day, so we resort to politics. Only about 22 percent of tribes are at Stage Four, oriented by our values, saying "We're great. And our values are beginning to unite us." Only two percent, only two percent of tribes get to Stage Five. And those are the ones that change the world. So the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society. But you don't leave them where you found them. Okay? Tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are. So we have to have the ability to talk all the levels, to go to where they are. And then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level. I'd like to show you some examples of this. One of the people we interviewed was Frank Jordan, former Mayor of San Francisco. Before that he was Chief of Police in San Francisco. And he grew up essentially in Stage One. And you know what changed his life? It was walking into one of these, a Boys and Girls Club. Now here is what happened to this person who eventually became Mayor of San Francisco. He went from being alive and passionate at Stage One — remember, "Life sucks, despairing hostility, I will do whatever it takes to survive" — to walking into a Boys and Girls Club, folding his arms, sitting down in a chair, and saying, "Wow. My life really sucks. I don't know anybody. I mean, if I was into boxing, like they were, then my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does. So I'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything." In fact, that's progress. We move people from Stage One to Stage Two by getting them in a new tribe and then, over time, getting them connected. So, what about moving from Stage Three to Stage Four? I want to argue that we're doing that right here. TED represents a set of values, and as we unite around these values, something really interesting begins to emerge. If you want this experience to live on as something historic, then at the reception tonight I'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking. Which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach, extend your influence, but instead, find someone you don't know, and find someone else you don't know, and introduce them. That's called a triadic relationship. See, people who build world-changing tribes do that. They extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them, not just to myself, so that my following is greater, but I connect people who don't know each other to something greater than themselves. And ultimately that adds to their values. But we're not done yet. Because then how do we go from Stage Four, which is great, to Stage Five? The story that I like to end with is this. It comes out of a place called the Gallup Organization. You know they do polls, right? So it's Stage Four. We're great. Who is not great? Pretty much everybody else who does polls. If Gallup releases a poll on the same day that NBC releases a poll, people will pay attention to the Gallup poll. Okay, we understand that. So, they were bored. They wanted to change the world. So here is the question someone asked. "How could we, instead of just polling what Asia thinks or what the United States thinks, or who thinks what about Obama versus McCain or something like that, what does the entire world think?" And they found a way to do the first-ever world poll. They had people involved who were Nobel laureates in economics, who reported being bored. And suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out, "How do we survey the population of Sub-Saharan Africa? How do we survey populations that don't have access to technology, and speak languages we don't speak, and we don't know anyone who speaks those languages. Because in order to achieve on this great mission, we have to be able to do it. Incidentally, they did pull it off. And they released the first-ever world poll. So I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. First of all: we all form tribes, all of us. You're in tribes here. Hopefully you're extending the reach of the tribes that you have. But the question on the table is this: What kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making? You're hearing one presentation after another, often representing a group of people, a tribe, about how they have changed the world. If you do what we've talked about, you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you're in. And you don't leave them where they are. You nudge them forward. You remember to talk all five culture stages. Because we've got people in all five, around us. And the question that I'd like to leave you with is this: Will your tribes change the world? Thank you very much. (Applause)

The danger of a single story

{0: 'Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" — (Laughter) — and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)

Optical illusions show how we see

{0: 'Beau Lotto seeks to pull aside the curtain of why we see what we do in order to create the possibility and agency in deciding what to perceive next.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society. But first, we have to ask another question, which is, "What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. Let me show you what I mean. Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? And these are two projections from the world. They're identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. So how on Earth do we even see? So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters. So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing, right? There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again. So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. And I'll tell you — don't look anywhere else — I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past. So I'll show you what I mean. Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective — just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions. This is one I made a few years ago. And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. That is your perceptual reality. The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same. Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene. And see what happens to your perception. The four blue tiles on the left are gray. The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray. They are the same. Okay? Don't believe me? Let's watch it again. What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have — let's turn this around — a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities. Are we the only ones that see illusions? The answer to this question is no. Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. So in my lab we work on bumblebees, because we can completely control their experience, and see how it alters the architecture of their brain. We do this in what we call the Bee Matrix. Here you have the hive. You can see the queen bee, the large bee in the middle. Those are her daughters, the eggs. They go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube. You'll see one of the bees come out here. You see how she has a little number on her? There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her. Now, they're not born that way, right? We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep. Then you can superglue little numbers on them. (Laughter) And now, in this experiment they get a reward if they go to the blue flowers. They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water. She's drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, then fly. And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go where the other bees go. So they copy each other. They can count to five. They can recognize faces. And here she comes down the ladder. And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot, and throw up, and that's honey. (Laughter) Now remember, she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers, but what are these bees doing in the upper right corner? It looks like they're going to green flowers. Now, are they getting it wrong? And the answer to the question is no. Those are actually blue flowers. But those are blue flowers under green light. So they're using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do. So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, "to demonstrate the fragility of our senses." Okay, this is complete rubbish. The senses aren't fragile. And if they were, we wouldn't be here. Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical. So, what I'd like to finish with is this over here. Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty. Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding. So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here — Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. Let's pull the covers off. Now remember — you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the same? No. The question is, "Is that an illusion?" And I'll leave you with that. So, thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)

Claim your "manspace"

{0: 'Sam Martin is the director of digital strategy at Texas Monthly magazine, and the author of "Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory."'}

TEDGlobal 2009

So, I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves, but first I want to tell you why I'm here. I'm here for two reasons. These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren. When Ford was about three years old, we shared a very small room together, in a very small space. My office was on one half of the bedroom, and his bedroom was on the other half. And you can imagine, if you're a writer, that things would get really crowded around deadlines. So when Wren was on the way, I realized I needed to find a space of my own. There was no more space in the house. So I went out to the backyard, and without any previous building experience, and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials, I built this space. It had everything I needed. It was quiet. There was enough space. And I had control, which was very important. As I was building this space, I thought to myself, "Surely I'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own." So I did some research. And I found that there was an historic precedence. Hemingway had his writing space. Elvis had two or three manspaces, which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland. In the popular culture, Superman had the Fortress of Solitude, and there was, of course, the Batcave. So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now. Here is one of the first spaces I found. It is in Austin, Texas, which is where I'm from. On the outside it looks like a very typical garage, a nice garage. But on the inside, it's anything but. And this, to me, is a pretty classic manspace. It has neon concert posters, a bar and, of course, the leg lamp, which is very important. I soon realized that manspaces didn't have to be only inside. This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard, out of landscaping timbers, astroturf. And he found the scoreboard in the trash. Here's another outdoor space, a little bit more sophisticated. This a 1923 wooden tugboat, made completely out of Douglas fir. The guy did it all himself. And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside. So, pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find, which was, quite frankly, a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs. There were definitely hang-out spots. But some were for working, some were for playing, some were for guys to collect their things. Most of all, I was just surprised with what I was finding. Take this place for example. On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage. This is in Long Island, New York. The only thing that might tip you off is the round window. On the inside it's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house. The man imported all the materials from Japan, and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style. It has no nails or screws. All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed. Here is another pretty typical scene. This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside. (Laughter) And so there is a good reason for this. It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough. He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics, and he trains in this space. He trains other people. And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments, which is another sort of important part about a manspace. So, while this space represents someone's profession, this one certainly represents a passion. It's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship. It's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s. Museum quality. So, as I came to the end of my journey, I found over 50 spaces. And they were unexpected and they were surprising. But they were also — I was really impressed by how personalized they were, and how much work went into them. And I realized that's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did. And they really loved their professions. And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies. And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do, and who they were. So if you don't have a space of your own, I highly recommend finding one, and getting into it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

New York -- before the City

{0: "Armed with an 18th-century map, a GPS and reams of data, Eric Sanderson has re-plotted the Manhattan of 1609, just in time for New York's quadricentennial. "}

TEDGlobal 2009

The substance of things unseen. Cities, past and future. In Oxford, perhaps we can use Lewis Carroll and look in the looking glass that is New York City to try and see our true selves, or perhaps pass through to another world. Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world." My colleagues and I have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call The Mannahatta Project. We're trying to discover what Henry Hudson would have seen on the afternoon of September 12th, 1609, when he sailed into New York harbor. And I'd like to tell you the story in three acts, and if I have time still, an epilogue. So, Act I: A Map Found. So, I didn't grow up in New York. I grew up out west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, like you see here, in the Red Rock Canyon. And from these early experiences as a child I learned to love landscapes. And so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies, I studied this emerging field of landscape ecology. Landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals. This experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world. And over the last decade, I traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos. But every time I would return from my trips I'd return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I'd look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I'd wonder, "How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?" I'd go to Times Square and I'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I'd go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan. I started reading about the history and the geography in New York City. I read that New York City was the first mega-city, a city of 10 million people or more, in 1950. I started seeing paintings like this. For those of you who are from New York, this is 125th street under the West Side Highway. (Laughter) It was once a beach. And this painting has John James Audubon, the painter, sitting on the rock. And it's looking up on the wooded heights of Washington Heights to Jeffrey's Hook, where the George Washington Bridge goes across today. Or this painting, from the 1740s, from Greenwich Village. Those are two students at King's College — later Columbia University — sitting on a hill, overlooking a valley. And so I'd go down to Greenwich Village and I'd look for this hill, and I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find that palm tree. What's that palm tree doing there? (Laughter) So, it was in the course of these investigations that I ran into a map. And it's this map you see here. It's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in. This map isn't from Hudson's time, but from the American Revolution, 170 years later, made by British military cartographers during the occupation of New York City. And it's a remarkable map. It's in the National Archives here in Kew. And it's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide. And if I zoom in to lower Manhattan you can see the extent of New York City as it was, right at the end of the American Revolution. Here's Bowling Green. And here's Broadway. And this is City Hall Park. So the city basically extended to City Hall Park. And just beyond it you can see features that have vanished, things that have disappeared. This is the Collect Pond, which was the fresh water source for New York City for its first 200 years, and for the Native Americans for thousands of years before that. You can see the Lispenard Meadows draining down through here, through what is TriBeCa now, and the beaches that come up from the Battery, all the way to 42nd St. This map was made for military reasons. They're mapping the roads, the buildings, these fortifications that they built. But they're also mapping things of ecological interest, also military interest: the hills, the marshes, the streams. This is Richmond Hill, and Minetta Water, which used to run its way through Greenwich Village. Or the swamp at Gramercy Park, right here. Or Murray Hill. And this is the Murrays' house on Murray Hill, 200 years ago. Here is Times Square, the two streams that came together to make a wetland in Times Square, as it was at the end of the American Revolution. So I saw this remarkable map in a book. And I thought to myself, "You know, if I could georeference this map, if I could place this map in the grid of the city today, I could find these lost features of the city, in the block-by-block geography that people know, the geography of where people go to work, and where they go to live, and where they like to eat." So, after some work we were able to georeference it, which allows us to put the modern streets on the city, and the buildings, and the open spaces, so that we can zoom in to where the Collect Pond is. We can digitize the Collect Pond and the streams, and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today. So this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography. But I had another idea about this map. If we take away the streets, and if we take away the buildings, and if we take away the open spaces, then we could take this map. If we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time. We could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals: to the hills, to the streams, to the basic hydrology and shoreline, to the beaches, the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape. Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology, and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave, if we make the soil map, with the 17 soil classes, that are defined by the National Conservation Service, if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were, then we can calculate the slopes. We can calculate the aspect. We can calculate the winter wind exposure — so, which way the winter winds blow across the landscape. The white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds. We compiled all the information about where the Native Americans were, the Lenape. And we built a probability map of where they might have been. So, the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on Manhattan, places that are close to water, places that are near the harbor to fish, places protected from the winter winds. We know that there was a Lenape settlement down here by the Collect Pond. And we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture, that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters" garden. So, we built a model that explains where those fields might have been. And the old fields, the successional fields that go. And we might think of these as abandoned. But, in fact, they're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants. And they have become successional shrub lands, and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities. And it turns out that Manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types. You can think of these as neighborhoods, as distinctive as TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and Inwood — that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities, the beaches. And 55 is a lot. On a per-area basis, Manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than Yosemite does, than Yellowstone, than Amboseli. It was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity. So, Act II: A Home Reconstructed. So, we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees, the 85 different kinds of fish that were on Manhattan, the Heath hens, the species that aren't there anymore, the beavers on all the streams, the black bears, and the Native Americans, to study how they used and thought about their landscape. We wanted to try and map these. And to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs. Where do they get their food? Where do they get their water? Where do they get their shelter? Where do they get their reproductive resources? To an ecologist, the intersection of these is habitat, but to most people, the intersection of these is their home. So, we would read in field guides, the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves, you know, what beavers need is, "A slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows, near the water." That's the best thing for a beaver. So we just started making a list. Here is the beaver. And here is the stream, and the aspen and the alder and the willow. As if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver. Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places. Or the bobcat, needing rabbits and beavers and den sites. And rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs. But a beaver also needs things. And that having it on either side means that we can link it together, that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species. Moreover, we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist, but you can look up what an aspen needs. An aspen needs fire and dry soils. And you can look at what a wet meadow needs. And it need beavers to create the wetlands, and maybe some other things. But you can also talk about sunny places. So, what does a sunny place need? Not habitat per se. But what are the conditions that make it possible? Or fire. Or dry soils. And that you can put these on a grid that's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way. And then we can visualize this data like a network, like a social network. And this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on Manhattan, and everything they needed, going back to the geology, going back to time and space at the very core of the web. We call this the Muir Web. And if you zoom in on it it looks like this. Each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type. And those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together. They are the connections that actually make nature resilient. And the structure of this is what makes nature work, seen with all its parts. We call these Muir Webs after the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, who said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe." So then we took the Muir webs and we took them back to the maps. So if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th, and Lex and Third, maybe there was a stream in that block. And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there, and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses, the butterflies, the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees. Maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there. And perhaps a black bear walked by. And maybe Native Americans were there. And then we took this data. You can see this for yourself on our website. You can zoom into any block on Manhattan, and see what might have been there 400 years ago. And we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in Act III. We used the tools they use in Hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies. And we tried to use it to visualize Third Avenue. So we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography. We'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters, and illuminate the landscape. We would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities. And feed into that the map of the species. So that we would actually take a photograph, flying above Times Square, looking toward the Hudson River, waiting for Hudson to come. Using this technology, we can make these fantastic georeferenced views. We can basically take a picture out of any window on Manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago. This is the view from the East River, looking up Murray Hill at where the United Nations is today. This is the view looking down the Hudson River, with Manhattan on the left, and New Jersey out on the right, looking out toward the Atlantic Ocean. This is the view over Times Square, with the beaver pond there, looking out toward the east. So we can see the Collect Pond, and Lispenard Marshes back behind. We can see the fields that the Native Americans made. And we can see this in the geography of the city today. So when you're watching "Law and Order," and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the New York Court House, right into the Collect Pond, 400 years ago. So these images are the work of my friend and colleague, Mark Boyer, who is here in the audience today. And I'd just like, if you would give him a hand, to call out for his fine work. (Applause) There is such power in bringing science and visualization together, that we can create images like this, perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass. And even though I've only had a brief time to speak, I hope you appreciate that Mannahatta was a very special place. The place that you see here on the left side was interconnected. It was based on this diversity. It had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world. But I wouldn't have you think that I don't like the place on the right, which I quite do. I've come to love the city and its kind of diversity, and its resilience, and its dependence on density and how we're connected together. In fact, that I see them as reflections of each other, much as Lewis Carroll did in "Through the Looking Glass." We can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time, that they really are the same place, that there is no way that cities can escape from nature. And I think this is what we're learning about building cities in the future. So if you'll allow me a brief epilogue, not about the past, but about 400 years from now, what we're realizing is that cities are habitats for people, and need to supply what people need: a sense of home, food, water, shelter, reproductive resources, and a sense of meaning. This is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity. And so many of the talks here at TED are about meaning, about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways, through technology, through art, through science, so much so that I think we focus so much on that side of our lives, that we haven't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter, and what we need to raise the kids. So, how can we envision the city of the future? Well, what if we go to Madison Square Park, and we imagine it without all the cars, and bicycles instead and large forests, and streams instead of sewers and storm drains? What if we imagined the Upper East Side with green roofs, and streams winding through the city, and windmills supplying the power we need? Or if we imagine the New York City metropolitan area, currently home to 12 million people, but 12 million people in the future, perhaps living at the density of Manhattan, in only 36 percent of the area, with the areas in between covered by farmland, covered by wetlands, covered by the marshes we need. This is the kind of future I think we need, is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of Manhattan, but that learns from the sustainability of the past, of the ecology, the original ecology, of nature with all its parts. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Robots that "show emotion"

{0: 'David Hanson merges robotics and art to design life-like, social robots that can mimic human expression and emotion.'}

TED2009

I'm Dr. David Hanson, and I build robots with character. And by that, I mean that I develop robots that are characters, but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you. So we're starting with a variety of technologies that have converged into these conversational character robots that can see faces, make eye contact with you, make a full range of facial expressions, understand speech and begin to model how you're feeling and who you are, and build a relationship with you. I developed a series of technologies that allowed the robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved, on lower power, which enabled the walking biped robots, the first androids. So, it's a full range of facial expressions simulating all the major muscles in the human face, running on very small batteries, extremely lightweight. The materials that allowed the battery-operated facial expressions is a material that we call Frubber, and it actually has three major innovations in the material that allow this to happen. One is hierarchical pores, and the other is a macro-molecular nanoscale porosity in the material. There he's starting to walk. This is at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. I built the head. They built the body. So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines, and not just sentience, but empathy. We're working with the Machine Perception Laboratory at the U.C. San Diego. They have this really remarkable facial expression technology that recognizes facial expressions, what facial expressions you're making. It also recognizes where you're looking, your head orientation. We're emulating all the major facial expressions, and then controlling it with the software that we call the Character Engine. And here is a little bit of the technology that's involved in that. In fact, right now — plug it from here, and then plug it in here, and now let's see if it gets my facial expressions. Okay. So I'm smiling. (Laughter) Now I'm frowning. And this is really heavily backlit. Okay, here we go. Oh, it's so sad. Okay, so you smile, frowning. So his perception of your emotional states is very important for machines to effectively become empathetic. Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Right? Those machines have no place for empathy. And there is billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future. So, we've made 20 robots in the last eight years, during the course of getting my Ph.D. And then I started Hanson Robotics, which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing. This is one of our robots that we showed at Wired NextFest a couple of years ago. And it sees multiple people in a scene, remembers where individual people are, and looks from person to person, remembering people. So, we're involving two things. One, the perception of people, and two, the natural interface, the natural form of the interface, so that it's more intuitive for you to interact with the robot. You start to believe that it's alive and aware. So one of my favorite projects was bringing all this stuff together in an artistic display of an android portrait of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote great works like, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which was the basis of the movie "Bladerunner." In these stories, robots often think that they're human, and they sort of come to life. So we put his writings, letters, his interviews, correspondences, into a huge database of thousands of pages, and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him. And it was kind of spooky, because he would say these things that just sounded like they really understood you. And this is one of the most exciting projects that we're developing, which is a little character that's a spokesbot for friendly artificial intelligence, friendly machine intelligence. And we're getting this mass-manufactured. We specked it out to actually be doable with a very, very low-cost bill of materials, so that it can become a childhood companion for kids. Interfacing with the Internet, it gets smarter over the years. As artificial intelligence evolves, so does his intelligence. Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. That's incredible. (Applause)

Life lessons from an ad man

{0: 'Rory Sutherland stands at the center of an advertising revolution in brand identities, designing cutting-edge, interactive campaigns that blur the line between ad and entertainment.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. It's held every two years in Burma. And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. (Laughter) But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value — you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind — gets rather a bad rap. If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things. Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, "How do we make the journey to Paris better?" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man ... ... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks? Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. So I'll ask you another question. What on earth is wrong with placebos? They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. They work extraordinarily well. They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. (Laughter) So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) (Applause) But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables — rather like contemporary Scottish people. (Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. The Prussian peasantry said, "We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing." There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried plan B. He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. (Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece. I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, "Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk." Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. (Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. All value is perceived value. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja — it's actually the Spanish for "orange juice." Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. As an advertising man, I have to admire that. But the first thing is that all value is subjective. Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points. Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. You start with 12 and they take them away. Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. In Britain we tend to feel, "Whoa! Got another three!" Not so in Italy. Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. Here's one: "Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813." The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. It was made of cast iron. Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past. So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. (Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare — there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic. If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies. What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, "What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street." Now, that is, actually, when you think about it — we take it for granted — it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic. Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. It involves limited raw materials. And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. It patently veers toward propaganda. However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer. When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. (Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter) Nowadays, the user is actually involved. This is actually what's called, in the digital world, "user-generated content." Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. (Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. In the world of food we call it cooking. This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. This is mobile food. British are very good at that. Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. We invented the whole lot of them. We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. (Laughter) I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. (Laughter) Finally, we have contextual communication. Now, the reason I show you Pernod — it's only one example. Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. (Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. (Laughter) But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information — B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is — He's invented the phrase, "persuasive technologies." He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. I'll give you one example. If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay? Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. If you did this, more people would save more. It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. (Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior. Now, I've got an example here from Canada. There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. (Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this. Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. (Laughter) Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter) Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. (Applause) Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. I would say it's a work of genius. But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research. Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. (Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter) Woman: Weren't they square? Woman #2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman #3: They look like the squares to me. Man: They — Yeah, it's all in the appearance. But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. But a six is very different from a nine. Woman # 3: Or an "M" and a "W". Man: An "M" and a "W", exactly. Man #2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking. Man: Just try both of them. Take a square one there, first. (Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man #2: The first one. Man: The first one? (Laughter) Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. So drink your wine blind in the future. But this is both hysterically funny — but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do. Two quotations to more or less end with. One of them is, "Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new." Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. Because they help people share news. They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic. The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders," which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

A brain in a supercomputer

{0: "Henry Markram is director of Blue Brain, a supercomputing project that can model components of the mammalian brain to precise cellular detail -- and simulate their activity in 3D. Soon he'll simulate a whole rat brain in real time."}

TEDGlobal 2009

Our mission is to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain. And we've done, in the past four years, a proof of concept on a small part of the rodent brain, and with this proof of concept we are now scaling the project up to reach the human brain. Why are we doing this? There are three important reasons. The first is, it's essential for us to understand the human brain if we do want to get along in society, and I think that it is a key step in evolution. The second reason is, we cannot keep doing animal experimentation forever, and we have to embody all our data and all our knowledge into a working model. It's like a Noah's Ark. It's like an archive. And the third reason is that there are two billion people on the planet that are affected by mental disorder, and the drugs that are used today are largely empirical. I think that we can come up with very concrete solutions on how to treat disorders. Now, even at this stage, we can use the brain model to explore some fundamental questions about how the brain works. And here, at TED, for the first time, I'd like to share with you how we're addressing one theory — there are many theories — one theory of how the brain works. So, this theory is that the brain creates, builds, a version of the universe, and projects this version of the universe, like a bubble, all around us. Now, this is of course a topic of philosophical debate for centuries. But, for the first time, we can actually address this, with brain simulation, and ask very systematic and rigorous questions, whether this theory could possibly be true. The reason why the moon is huge on the horizon is simply because our perceptual bubble does not stretch out 380,000 kilometers. It runs out of space. And so what we do is we compare the buildings within our perceptual bubble, and we make a decision. We make a decision it's that big, even though it's not that big. And what that illustrates is that decisions are the key things that support our perceptual bubble. It keeps it alive. Without decisions you cannot see, you cannot think, you cannot feel. And you may think that anesthetics work by sending you into some deep sleep, or by blocking your receptors so that you don't feel pain, but in fact most anesthetics don't work that way. What they do is they introduce a noise into the brain so that the neurons cannot understand each other. They are confused, and you cannot make a decision. So, while you're trying to make up your mind what the doctor, the surgeon, is doing while he's hacking away at your body, he's long gone. He's at home having tea. (Laughter) So, when you walk up to a door and you open it, what you compulsively have to do to perceive is to make decisions, thousands of decisions about the size of the room, the walls, the height, the objects in this room. 99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room. So I can say, with some certainty, "I think, therefore I am." But I cannot say, "You think, therefore you are," because "you" are within my perceptual bubble. Now, we can speculate and philosophize this, but we don't actually have to for the next hundred years. We can ask a very concrete question. "Can the brain build such a perception?" Is it capable of doing it? Does it have the substance to do it? And that's what I'm going to describe to you today. So, it took the universe 11 billion years to build the brain. It had to improve it a little bit. It had to add to the frontal part, so that you would have instincts, because they had to cope on land. But the real big step was the neocortex. It's a new brain. You needed it. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. So, you can think of the neocortex actually as the ultimate solution today, of the universe as we know it. It's the pinnacle, it's the final product that the universe has produced. It was so successful in evolution that from mouse to man it expanded about a thousandfold in terms of the numbers of neurons, to produce this almost frightening organ, structure. And it has not stopped its evolutionary path. In fact, the neocortex in the human brain is evolving at an enormous speed. If you zoom into the surface of the neocortex, you discover that it's made up of little modules, G5 processors, like in a computer. But there are about a million of them. They were so successful in evolution that what we did was to duplicate them over and over and add more and more of them to the brain until we ran out of space in the skull. And the brain started to fold in on itself, and that's why the neocortex is so highly convoluted. We're just packing in columns, so that we'd have more neocortical columns to perform more complex functions. So you can think of the neocortex actually as a massive grand piano, a million-key grand piano. Each of these neocortical columns would produce a note. You stimulate it; it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe, your reality. Now, of course it takes years to learn how to master a grand piano with a million keys. That's why you have to send your kids to good schools, hopefully eventually to Oxford. But it's not only education. It's also genetics. You may be born lucky, where you know how to master your neocortical column, and you can play a fantastic symphony. In fact, there is a new theory of autism called the "intense world" theory, which suggests that the neocortical columns are super-columns. They are highly reactive, and they are super-plastic, and so the autists are probably capable of building and learning a symphony which is unthinkable for us. But you can also understand that if you have a disease within one of these columns, the note is going to be off. The perception, the symphony that you create is going to be corrupted, and you will have symptoms of disease. So, the Holy Grail for neuroscience is really to understand the design of the neocoritical column — and it's not just for neuroscience; it's perhaps to understand perception, to understand reality, and perhaps to even also understand physical reality. So, what we did was, for the past 15 years, was to dissect out the neocortex, systematically. It's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rainforest. How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees? How many of each type of tree do you have? Where are they positioned? But it's a bit more than cataloging because you actually have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity, because the neurons don't just like to connect with any neuron. They choose very carefully who they connect with. It's also more than cataloging because you actually have to build three-dimensional digital models of them. And we did that for tens of thousands of neurons, built digital models of all the different types of neurons we came across. And once you have that, you can actually begin to build the neocortical column. And here we're coiling them up. But as you do this, what you see is that the branches intersect actually in millions of locations, and at each of these intersections they can form a synapse. And a synapse is a chemical location where they communicate with each other. And these synapses together form the network or the circuit of the brain. Now, the circuit, you could also think of as the fabric of the brain. And when you think of the fabric of the brain, the structure, how is it built? What is the pattern of the carpet? You realize that this poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of the brain, and especially to a theory that says that there is some reality that emerges out of this carpet, out of this particular carpet with a particular pattern. The reason is because the most important design secret of the brain is diversity. Every neuron is different. It's the same in the forest. Every pine tree is different. You may have many different types of trees, but every pine tree is different. And in the brain it's the same. So there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as another, and there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as in yours. And your neurons are not going to be oriented and positioned in exactly the same way. And you may have more or less neurons. So it's very unlikely that you got the same fabric, the same circuitry. So, how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other? Well, we don't have to speculate. We can look at all 10 million synapses now. We can look at the fabric. And we can change neurons. We can use different neurons with different variations. We can position them in different places, orient them in different places. We can use less or more of them. And when we do that what we discovered is that the circuitry does change. But the pattern of how the circuitry is designed does not. So, the fabric of the brain, even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, it may have different types of neurons, different morphologies of neurons, we actually do share the same fabric. And we think this is species-specific, which means that that could explain why we can't communicate across species. So, let's switch it on. But to do it, what you have to do is you have to make this come alive. We make it come alive with equations, a lot of mathematics. And, in fact, the equations that make neurons into electrical generators were discovered by two Cambridge Nobel Laureates. So, we have the mathematics to make neurons come alive. We also have the mathematics to describe how neurons collect information, and how they create a little lightning bolt to communicate with each other. And when they get to the synapse, what they do is they effectively, literally, shock the synapse. It's like electrical shock that releases the chemicals from these synapses. And we've got the mathematics to describe this process. So we can describe the communication between the neurons. There literally are only a handful of equations that you need to simulate the activity of the neocortex. But what you do need is a very big computer. And in fact you need one laptop to do all the calculations just for one neuron. So you need 10,000 laptops. So where do you go? You go to IBM, and you get a supercomputer, because they know how to take 10,000 laptops and put it into the size of a refrigerator. So now we have this Blue Gene supercomputer. We can load up all the neurons, each one on to its processor, and fire it up, and see what happens. Take the magic carpet for a ride. Here we activate it. And this gives the first glimpse of what is happening in your brain when there is a stimulation. It's the first view. Now, when you look at that the first time, you think, "My god. How is reality coming out of that?" But, in fact, you can start, even though we haven't trained this neocortical column to create a specific reality. But we can ask, "Where is the rose?" We can ask, "Where is it inside, if we stimulate it with a picture?" Where is it inside the neocortex? Ultimately it's got to be there if we stimulated it with it. So, the way that we can look at that is to ignore the neurons, ignore the synapses, and look just at the raw electrical activity. Because that is what it's creating. It's creating electrical patterns. So when we did this, we indeed, for the first time, saw these ghost-like structures: electrical objects appearing within the neocortical column. And it's these electrical objects that are holding all the information about whatever stimulated it. And then when we zoomed into this, it's like a veritable universe. So the next step is just to take these brain coordinates and to project them into perceptual space. And if you do that, you will be able to step inside the reality that is created by this machine, by this piece of the brain. So, in summary, I think that the universe may have — it's possible — evolved a brain to see itself, which may be a first step in becoming aware of itself. There is a lot more to do to test these theories, and to test any other theories. But I hope that you are at least partly convinced that it is not impossible to build a brain. We can do it within 10 years, and if we do succeed, we will send to TED, in 10 years, a hologram to talk to you. Thank you. (Applause)

The 4 ways sound affects us

{0: 'Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Over the next five minutes, my intention is to transform your relationship with sound. Let me start with the observation that most of the sound around us is accidental; much of it is unpleasant. (Traffic noise) We stand on street corners, shouting over noise like this, pretending it doesn't exist. This habit of suppressing sound has meant that our relationship with sound has become largely unconscious. There are four major ways sound is affecting you all the time, and I'd like to raise them in your consciousness today. The first is physiological. (Alarm clocks ring) Sorry about that. I just gave you a shot of cortisol, your fight-flight hormone. Sounds are affecting your hormone secretions all the time, but also your breathing, heart rate — which I just also did — and your brainwaves. It's not just unpleasant sounds like that that do it. This is surf. (Ocean waves) It has the frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute. Most people find that very soothing, and, interestingly, 12 cycles per minute is roughly the frequency of the breathing of a sleeping human, so there is a deep resonance with being at rest. We also associate it with being stress-free and on holiday. The second way in which sound affects you is psychological. Music is the most powerful form of sound that we know that affects our emotional state. (Albinoni's Adagio) This is guaranteed to make most of you feel pretty sad if I leave it on. Music is not the only kind of sound, however, which affects your emotions. Natural sound can do that, too. Birdsong, for example, is a sound which most people find reassuring. There's a reason: over hundreds of thousands of years we've learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. It's when they stop you need to be worried. The third way in which sound affects you is cognitively. You can't understand two people talking at once (Voice-over) or in this case, one person talking twice. You have to choose which me you're going to listen to. We have a very small amount of bandwidth for processing auditory input, which is why noise like this ... (Office noise) is extremely damaging for productivity. If you have to work in an open-plan office like this, your productivity is greatly reduced. And whatever number you're thinking of, it probably isn't as bad as this. [Open-plan offices productivity down 66%] You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. I have a tip for you: if you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like birdsong. Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be. The fourth way in which sound affects us is behaviorally. With all that other stuff going on, it would be amazing if our behavior didn't change. (Techno music) So ask yourself: Is this person ever going to drive at a steady 28 miles per hour? I don't think so. At the simplest, you move away from unpleasant sound and towards pleasant sounds. So if I were to play this ... (Jackhammer) for more than a few seconds, you'd feel uncomfortable; for more than a few minutes, you'd be leaving the room in droves. For people who can't get away from noise like that, it's extremely damaging for their health. And that's not the only thing that bad sound damages. Most retail sound is inappropriate and accidental, even hostile, and it has a dramatic effect on sales. For you retailers, you may want to look away before I show this slide. [Inappropriate retail soundscapes sales down 28%] They're losing up to 30 percent of their business with people leaving shops faster, or just turning around at the door. We've all done it, left the area, because the sound in there is so dreadful. I want to spend just a moment talking about the model we've developed, which allows us to start at the top and look at the drivers of sound, analyze the soundscape and then predict the four outcomes I just talked about. Or start at the bottom and say what outcomes we want, and then design a soundscape to have a desired effect. At last we've got some science we can apply. And we're in the business of designing soundscapes. Just a word on music. Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately deployed. It's powerful for two reasons: you recognize it fast, and you associate it very powerfully. I'll give you two examples. (First chord of "A Hard Day's Night") Most of you recognize that immediately. The younger, maybe not. (Laughter) (First notes of "Jaws" theme) Most of you associate that with something! Now, those are one-second samples of music. Music is very powerful, and unfortunately, it's veneering commercial spaces, often inappropriately. I hope that's going to change over the next few years. Let me talk about brands for a moment, since some of you run brands. Every brand is out there making sound right now. There are eight expressions of a brand in sound; they're all important. And every brand needs to have guidelines at the center. I'm glad to say that is starting to happen now. (Intel ad jingle) You all recognize that one. (Nokia ringtone) This is the most-played tune in the world today — 1.8 billion times a day, that tune is played. (Laughter) And it cost Nokia absolutely nothing. I'll leave you with four golden rules, for those of you who run businesses, for commercial sound. First, make it congruent, pointing in the same direction as your visual communication. That increases impact by over 1,100 percent. If your sound is pointing the opposite direction, incongruent, you reduce impact by 86 percent. That's an order of magnitude, up or down. This is important. Secondly, make it appropriate to the situation. Thirdly, make it valuable. Give people something with the sound, don't just bombard them with stuff. Finally, test and test it again. Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens. So I hope this talk has raised sound in your consciousness. If you're listening consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world. I'll leave you with more birdsong. (Birds chirping) I recommend at least five minutes a day, but there's no maximum dose. Thank you for lending me your ears today. (Applause)

The post-crisis consumer

{0: 'John Gerzema uses data, analysis and decades of experience to identify trends and develop daring new approaches to advertising. '}

TEDxKC

Thirteen trillion dollars in wealth has evaporated over the course of the last two years. We've questioned the future of capitalism. We've questioned the financial industry. We've looked at our government oversight. We've questioned where we're going. And yet, at the same time, this very well may be a seminal moment in American history, an opportunity for the consumer to actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory in America. I'm calling this The Great Unwind. (Laughter) And the idea is a simple, simple idea, which is the fact that the consumer has moved from a state of anxiety to action. Consumers who represent 72 percent of the GDP of America have actually started, just like banks and just like businesses, to de-leverage, to unwind their leverage in daily life, to remove themselves from the liability and risk that presents itself as they move forward. So, to understand this — and I'm going to stress this — it's not about the consumer being in retreat. The consumer is empowered. To understand this, we'll step back and look at what's happened over the last year and a half. So if you've been gone, this is the CliffsNotes on what's happened in the economy. (Laughter) Unemployment up. Housing values down. Equity markets down. Commodity prices are like this. If you're a mom trying to manage a budget, and oil was 150 dollars a barrel last summer, and it's somewhere between 50 and 70, do you plan vacations? How do you buy? What's your strategy in your household? Will the bailout work? We have national debt, Detroit, currency valuations, health care — all these issues facing us. You put them all together, mix them up in a bouillabaisse, and you have consumer confidence that's basically a ticking time bomb. In fact, let's go back and look at what caused this crisis, because the consumer, all of us, in our daily lives, actually contributed a large part to the problem. This is something I call the 50-20 paradox. It took us 50 years to reach annual savings ratings of almost 10 percent. Fifty years. Do you know what this was right here? This was World War II. Do you know why savings was so high? There was nothing to buy, unless you wanted to buy some rivets. What happened, though, over the course of the last 20 years, we went from a 10 percent savings rate to a negative savings rate. Because we binged. We bought extra-large cars, supersized everything, we bought remedies for restless leg syndrome. All these things together basically created a factor where the consumer drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today. The personal debt-to-income ratio basically went from 65 to 135 percent in the span of about 15 years. So consumers got over-leveraged. And of course our banks did as well, as did our federal government. This is an absolutely staggering chart. It shows leverage, trended out from 1919 to 2009. And what you end up seeing is the whole phenomenon that we are actually stepping forth and basically leveraging future education, future children in our households. So if you look at this in the context of visualizing the bailout, what you can see is, if you stack up dollar bills, first of all, 360,000 dollars is about the size of a five-foot-four guy. But if you stack it up, you see this amazing, staggering amount of dollars that have been put into the system to fund and bail us out. So this is the first 315 billion. But I read this fact the other day, that one trillion seconds equals 32,000 years. So if you think about that, the context, the casualness with which we talk about trillion-dollar bailout here and trillion there, we are stacking ourselves up for long-term leverage. However, consumers have moved. They are taking responsibility. What we're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate. In fact, 11 straight months of savings have happened since the beginning of the crisis. We're working our way back up to that 10 percent. Also, remarkably, in the fourth quarter, spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years — almost a 3.7 percent decline. Visa now reports that more people are using debit cards than credit cards. So we're starting to pay for things with money that we have. And we're starting to be much more careful about how we save and invest. But that's not really the whole story, because this has also been a dramatic time of transformation. And you've got to admit, over the last year and a half, consumers have been doing some weird things. It's pretty staggering, what we've lived through. If you take into account that 80 percent of all Americans were born after World War II, this was essentially our Depression. And so, as a result, some crazy things have happened. I'll give you some examples. Let's talk about dentists, vasectomies, guns and shark attacks. (Laughter) Dentists report molars — people grinding their teeth, coming in and reporting that they've had stress. So there's an increase in people having to have their fillings replaced. Gun sales, according to the FBI, who does background checks, are up almost 25 percent since January. Vasectomies are up 48 percent, according to the Cornell Institute. And lastly, but a very good point, hopefully not related to the former point I just made, which is that shark attacks are at their lowest level from 2003. Does anybody know why? (Laughter) No one's at the beach. So there's a bright side to everything. But seriously, what we see happening, and the reason I want to stress that the consumer is not in retreat, is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer who drove us into this recession to lead us right back out. What I mean by that is we can move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption. Right? (Applause) If you think about the last three decades, the consumer has moved from savvy about marketing in the '90s, to gathering all these amazing social and search tools in this decade. But the one thing holding them back is the ability to discriminate. By restricting their demand, consumers can actually align their values with their spending, and drive capitalism and business to not just be about more, but to be about better. We're going to explain that right now. Based on Y&R's BrandAsset Valuator, proprietary tool of VML and Young & Rubicam, we set out to understand what's been happening in the crisis with the consumer marketplace. We found a couple of really interesting things. We're going to go through four value shifts that we see driving new consumer behaviors, that offer new management principles. The first cultural value shift we see is this tendency toward something we call "liquid life." This is the movement from Americans defining their success on having things to having liquidity, because the less excess that you have around you, the more nimble and fleet of foot you are. As a result, déclassé consumption is in. Déclassé consumption is the whole idea that spending money frivolously makes you look a little bit anti-fashion. The management principle is dollars and cents. So let's look at some examples of this déclassé consumption that falls out of this value. The first thing is, something must be happening when P. Diddy vows to tone down his bling. (Laughter) But seriously, we also have this phenomenon on Madison Avenue and in other places, where people are actually walking out of luxury boutiques with ordinary, generic paper bags to hide the brand purchases. We see high-end haggling in fashion today, high-end haggling for luxury and real estate. We also see just a relaxing of ego, and sort of a dismantling of artifice. This is a story on the yacht club that's all basically blue collar. Blue-collar yacht club — where you can join, but you've got to work in the boatyard as condition of membership. We also see the trend toward tourism that's a little bit more low-key: agritourism — going to vineyards and going to farms. And then we also see this movement forward from dollars and cents. What businesses can do to connect with these new mindsets is really interesting. A couple things that are kind of cool. One is that Frito-Lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer. They found their consumer had more money at the beginning of the month, less at the end of the month. So they started to change their packaging: larger packs at the beginning of the month, smaller packaging at the end of the month. Really interestingly, too, was the San Francisco Giants. They've just instituted dynamic pricing. It takes into account everything from the pitcher match-ups, to the weather, to the team records, in setting prices for the consumer. Another quick example of these types of movements is the rise of Zynga. Zynga has risen on the consumer's desire to not want to be locked in to fixed cost. Again, this theme is about variable cost, variable living. So micro-payments have become huge. And lastly, some people are using Hulu as a device to get rid of their cable bill. So, really clever ideas there that are being taken ahold of and that marketers are starting to understand. The second of the four values is this movement toward ethics and fair play. We see that play itself out with empathy and respect. The consumer is demanding it. And, as a result, businesses must provide not only value, but values. Increasingly, consumers are looking at the culture of the company, at their conduct in the marketplace. So we see with empathy and respect lots of really hopeful things come out of this recession. I'll give you a few examples. One is the rise toward communities and neighborhoods, and increased emphasis on your neighbors as your support system. Also, a wonderful by-product of a really lousy thing, which has been unemployment, is a rise in volunteerism that's been noted in our country. We also see the phenomenon — some of you may have "boomerang kids" — these are "boomerang alumni," where universities are actually reconnecting with alumni and helping them with jobs, sharing skills and retraining. We also talked about character and professionalism. We had this miracle on the Hudson in New York City in January, and suddenly Sully has become a key name on BabyCenter. (Laughter) So, from a value and values standpoint, what companies can do is connect in lots of different ways. Microsoft is doing something wonderful. They are actually vowing to retrain two million Americans with IT training, using their existing infrastructure to do something good. Also, a really interesting company is GORE-TEX. GORE-TEX is all about personal accountability of their management and their employees, to the point where they really kind of shun the idea of bosses. But they also talk about the fact that their executives — all of their expense reports are put onto their company intranet for everyone to see. Complete transparency. Think twice before you have that bottle of wine. (Laughter) The third of the four laws of post-crisis consumerism is about durable living. We're seeing in our data that consumers are realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint. They're digging in and looking for ways to extract value out of every purchase they make. Witness the fact that Americans are holding on to their cars longer than ever before: 9.4 years on average, in March. A record. We also see the fact that libraries have become a huge resource for America. Did you know that 68 percent of Americans now carry a library card? The highest percentage ever in our nation's history. So what you see in this trend is also the accumulation of knowledge. Continuing education is up. Everything is focused on betterment, training, development and moving forward. We also see a big DIY movement. I was fascinated to learn that 30 percent of all homes in America are actually built by owners. That includes cottages and the like, but 30 percent. People are getting their hands dirty, rolling up their sleeves. They want these skills. We see it with the phenomenon of raising backyard hens, chickens and ducks. And when you work out the math, they say it doesn't work, but the principle is there; it's about being sustainable and taking care of yourself. Then we look at the High Line in New York City, an excellent use of reimagining existing infrastructure for something good, which is a brand-new park in New York City. So what brands can do, and companies, is pay dividends to consumers, be a brand that lasts, offer transparency, promise you're going to be there beyond today's sale. Perfect example of that is Patagonia. Patagonia's "Footprint Chronicles" basically goes through and tracks every product they make, and gives you social responsibility, and helps you understand the ethics behind the product they make. Another great example is Fidelity. Rather than instant cash-back rewards on your credit or debit purchases, this is about 529 rewards for your student education. Or the interesting company Sunrun. I love this company. They've created a consumer collective where they put solar panels on households and create a consumer-based utility, where the electricity they generate is basically pumped back out into the marketplace. So it's a consumer-driven co-op. The fourth post-crisis consumerism that we see is this movement about "return to the fold." It's incredibly important right now. Trust is not parceled out, as we all know. It's now about connecting to your communities, connecting to your social networks. In my book, I talked about the fact that 72 percent of people trust what other people say about a brand or a company, versus 15 percent on advertising. So in that respect, cooperative consumerism has really taken off. This is about consumers working together to get what they want out of the marketplace. Let's look at a couple of quick examples. The artisanal movement is huge: everything about locally derived products and services, supporting your local neighborhoods, whether it's cheeses, wines and other products. Also this rise of local currencies. Realizing that it's difficult to get loans in this environment, you're doing business with people you trust in your local markets. So this rise of local currency is another really interesting phenomenon. And then they did a recent report I thought was fascinating. They actually started, in certain communities in the United States, to publish people's electricity usage. And what they found out is when that was available for public record, the people's electricity usage in those communities dropped. Then we also look at the idea of cow-pooling, which is the whole phenomenon of consumers organizing together to buy meat from organic farms, that they know is safe and controlled in the way that they want it to be controlled. And then there's this other really interesting movement in California, which is about carrot mobs. The traditional thing would be to boycott, right? Have a stick. Well, why not have a carrot? So these are consumers organizing, pooling their resources to incentify companies to do good. And then we look at what companies can do. This is all the opportunity about being a community organizer. You have to realize that you can't fight and control this. You actually need to organize it. You need to harness it. You need to give it meaning. And there's lots of really interesting examples here. First is just the rise of the fact that Zagat's has actually moved out of and diversified from rating restaurants, into actually rating health care. So what credentials does Zagat's have? Well, they have a lot, because it's their network of people. So that becomes a very powerful force for them to make their brand more elastic. Then you look at the phenomenon of Kogi. This Kogi doesn't exist. It's a moving truck. It's a moving truck through L.A., and the only way you can find it is through Twitter. (Laughter) Or you look at Johnson & Johnson's "Momversations," a phenomenal blog that's been built up, where J&J basically is tapping into the power of mommy bloggers, allowing them to create a forum where they can communicate and connect. And it's also become a very valuable advertising revenue for J&J as well. This, plus the fact that you've got phenomenal work from CEOs, from Ford to Zappos, connecting on Twitter, creating an open environment, allowing their employees to be part of the process, rather than hidden behind walls. You see this rising force in total transparency and openness that companies are starting to adopt, all because the consumer is demanding it. So when we look at this and step back, what I believe is that the crisis that exists today is definitely real. It's been tremendously powerful for consumers. But at the same time, this is also a tremendous opportunity. The Chinese character for crisis is actually the same side of the same coin. Crisis equals opportunity. What we're seeing with consumers right now is the ability for them to actually lead us forward out of this recession. So we believe that values-driven spending will force capitalism to be better: it will drive innovation; it will make longer-lasting products; it will create better, more intuitive customer service; and it will give us the opportunity to connect with companies that share the values that we share. So when we look back and step out at this and see the beginning of these trends that we're seeing in our data, we see a very hopeful picture for the future of America. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Animating a photo-real digital face

{0: "Paul Debevec's digital inventions have powered the breathtaking visual effects in films like <em>The Matrix</em>, <em>Superman Returns</em>, <em>King Kong</em> and <em>The Curious Case of Benjamin Button</em>."}

TEDxUSC

One of the biggest challenges in computer graphics has been being able to create a photo-real, digital human face. And one of the reasons it is so difficult is that, unlike aliens and dinosaurs, we look at human faces every day. They are very important to how we communicate with each other. As a result, we're tuned in to the subtlest things that could possibly be wrong with a computer rendering, in order to believe whether these things are realistic. And what I'm going to do in the next five minutes is take you through a process where we tried to create a reasonably photo-realistic computer-generated face, using some computer graphics technology we've developed, and also some collaborators at a company called Image Metrics. And we're going to try to do a photo-real face of an actress named Emily O'Brien, who is right there. And that's actually a completely computer-generated rendering of her face. By the end of the talk, we're going to see it move. The way that we did this is we tried to start with Emily herself, who was gracious enough to come to our laboratory in Marina Del Rey, and sit for a session in Light Stage 5. This is a face-scanning sphere, with 156 white LEDs all around that allow us to photograph her in a series of very controlled illumination conditions. And the lighting that we use these days looks something like this. We shoot all of these photographs in about three seconds. And we basically capture enough information with video projector patterns that drape over the contours of her face, and different principle directions of light from the light stage, to figure out both the coarse-scale and the fine-scale detail of her face. If we zoom in on this photograph right here, we can see it's a really nice photograph to have of her, because she is lit from absolutely everywhere at the same time to get a nice image of her facial texture. And in addition, we've actually used polarizers on all the lights — just like polarized sunglasses can block the glare off of the road, polarizers can block the shine off of the skin, so we don't get all those specular reflections to take this map. Now, if we turn the polarizers around just a little bit, we can actually bring that specular reflection of the skin back in, and you can see she looks kind of shiny and oily at this point. If you take the difference between these two images here, you can get an image lit from the entire sphere of light of just the shine off of Emily's skin. I don't think any photograph like this had ever been taken before we had done this. And this is very important light to capture, because this is the light that reflects off the first surface of the skin. It doesn't get underneath the translucent layers of the skin and blur out. And, as a result, it's a very good cue to the detailed shape of the skin-pore structure and all of the fine wrinkles that all of us have, the things that actually make us look like real humans. So, if we use information that comes off of this specular reflection, we can go from a traditional face scan that might have the gross contours of the face and the basic shape, and augment it with information that puts in all of that skin pore structure and fine wrinkles. And, even more importantly, since this is a photometric process that only takes three seconds to capture, we can shoot Emily in just part of an afternoon, in many different facial poses and facial expressions. So, here you can see her moving her eyes around, moving her mouth around. And these we're actually going to use to create a photo-real digital character. If you take a look at these scans that we have of Emily, you can see that the human face does an enormous amount of amazing things as it goes into different facial expressions. You can see things. Not only the face shape changes, but all sorts of different skin buckling and skin wrinkling occurs. You can see that the skin pore structure changes enormously from stretched skin pores to the regular skin texture. You can see the furrows in the brow and how the microstructure changes there. You can see muscles pulling down at flesh to bring her eyebrows down. Her muscles bulging in her forehead when she winces like that. In addition to this kind of high-resolution geometry, since it's all captured with cameras, we've got a great texture map to use for the face. And by looking at how the different color channels of the illumination, the red and the green and the blue, diffuse the light differently, we can come up with a way of shading the skin on the computer. Then, instead of looking like a plaster mannequin, it actually looks like it's made out of living human flesh. And this is what we used to give to the company Image Metrics to create a rigged, digital version of Emily. We're just seeing the coarse-scale geometry here. But they basically created a digital puppet of her, where you can pull on these various strings, and it actually moves her face in ways that are completely consistent with the scans that we took. And, in addition to the coarse-scale geometry, they also used all of that detail to create a set of what are called "displacement maps" that animate as well. These are the displacement maps here. And you can see those different wrinkles actually show up as she animates. So the next process was then to animate her. We actually used one of her own performances to provide the source data. So, by analyzing this video with computer vision techniques, they were able to drive the facial rig with the computer-generated performance. So what you're going to see now, after this, is a completely photo-real digital face. We can turn the volume up a little bit if that's available. Emily: Image Metrics is a markerless, performance-driven animation company. We specialize in high-quality facial animation for video games and films. Image Metrics is a markerless, performance-driven animation company. We specialize in high quality facial animation for video games and films. Paul Debevec: So, if we break that down into layers, here's that diffuse component we saw in the first slide. Here is the specular component animating. You can see all the wrinkles happening there. And there is the underlying wireframe mesh. And that is Emily herself. Now, where are we going with this here? We've gone a little bit beyond Light Stage 5. This is Light Stage 6, and we're looking at taking this technology and applying it to whole human bodies. This is Bruce Lawmen, one of our researchers in the group, who graciously agreed to get captured running in the Light Stage. And let's take a look at a computer-generated version of Bruce, running in a new environment. And thank you very much. (Applause)

Lead like the great conductors

{0: 'After a decade-long conducting career in his native Israel, Itay Talgam has reinvented himself as a "conductor of people" -- in government, academia, business and education. He is the author of The Ignorant Maestro.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting. Which is, you go onto a stage. There is an orchestra sitting. They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff. And I go on the podium. You know, this little office of the conductor. Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space. And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture. Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated, this. And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music. And this is fantastic. And it's so tempting to think that it's all about me. (Laughter) All those great people here, virtuosos, they make noise, they need me to do that. Not really. If it were that, I would just save you the talk, and teach you the gesture. So you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want, and you have perfect harmony. It doesn't work. Let's look at the first video. I hope you'll think it's a good example of harmony. And then speak a little bit about how it comes about. (Music) Was that nice? So that was a sort of a success. Now, who should we thank for the success? I mean, obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. They don't often even look at the conductor. Then you have the clapping audience, yeah, actually taking part in doing the music. You know Viennese audiences usually don't interfere with the music. This is the closest to an Oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in Vienna. (Laughter) Unlike, for example Israel, where audiences cough all the time. You know, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, used to say that, "Anywhere in the world, people that have the flu, they go to the doctor. In Tel Aviv they come to my concerts." (Laughter) So that's a sort of a tradition. But Viennese audiences do not do that. Here they go out of their regular, just to be part of that, to become part of the orchestra, and that's great. You know, audiences like you, yeah, make the event. But what about the conductor? What can you say the conductor was doing, actually? Um, he was happy. And I often show this to senior management. People get annoyed. "You come to work. How come you're so happy?" Something must be wrong there, yeah? But he's spreading happiness. And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time. You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. Yeah. You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. And then you have other stories, unseen. People who build this wonderful concert hall. People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert. That's a reason to go out of home. Yeah? And not all conductors do just that. Let's see somebody else, a great conductor. Riccardo Muti, please. (Music) Yeah, that was very short, but you could see it's a completely different figure. Right? He's awesome. He's so commanding. Yeah? So clear. Maybe a little bit over-clear. Can we have a little demonstration? Would you be my orchestra for a second? Can you sing, please, the first note of Don Giovanni? You have to sing "Aaaaaah," and I'll stop you. Okay? Ready? Audience: ♫ Aaaaaaah ... ♫ Itay Talgam: Come on, with me. If you do it without me I feel even more redundant than I already feel. So please, wait for the conductor. Now look at me. "Aaaaaah," and I stop you. Let's go. Audience: ♫ ... Aaaaaaaah ... ♫ (Laughter) Itay Talgam: So we'll have a little chat later. (Laughter) But ... There is a vacancy for a ... But — (Laughter) — you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger. Now what does Riccardo Muti do? He does something like this ... (Laughter) And then — sort of — (Laughter) So not only the instruction is clear, but also the sanction, what will happen if you don't do what I tell you. (Laughter) So, does it work? Yes, it works — to a certain point. When Muti is asked, "Why do you conduct like this?" He says, "I'm responsible." Responsible in front of him. No he doesn't really mean Him. He means Mozart, which is — (Laughter) — like a third seat from the center. (Laughter) So he says, "If I'm — (Applause) if I'm responsible for Mozart, this is going to be the only story to be told. It's Mozart as I, Riccardo Muti, understand it." And you know what happened to Muti? Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, "You're a great conductor. We don't want to work with you. Please resign." (Laughter) "Why? Because you don't let us develop. You're using us as instruments, not as partners. And our joy of music, etc., etc. ..." So he had to resign. Isn't that nice? (Laughter) He's a nice guy. He's a really nice guy. Well, can you do it with less control, or with a different kind of control? Let's look at the next conductor, Richard Strauss. (Music) I'm afraid you'll get the feeling that I really picked on him because he's old. It's not true. When he was a young man of about 30, he wrote what he called "The Ten Commandments for Conductors." The first one was: If you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong. That's the first one. The fourth one you'll like better. It says: Never look at the trombones — it only encourages them. (Laughter) So, the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself. Do not interfere. But how does it happen? Did you see him turning pages in the score? Now, either he is senile, and doesn't remember his own music, because he wrote the music. Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, "Come on guys. You have to play by the book. So it's not about my story. It's not about your story. It's only the execution of the written music, no interpretation." Interpretation is the real story of the performer. So, no, he doesn't want that. That's a different kind of control. Let's see another super-conductor, a German super-conductor. Herbert von Karajan, please. (Music) What's different? Did you see the eyes? Closed. Did you see the hands? Did you see this kind of movement? Let me conduct you. Twice. Once like a Muti, and you'll — (Claps) — clap, just once. And then like Karajan. Let's see what happens. Okay? Like Muti. You ready? Because Muti ... (Laughter) Okay? Ready? Let's do it. Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Hmm ... again. Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Good. Now like a Karajan. Since you're already trained, let me concentrate, close my eyes. Come, come. Audience: (Claps) (Laughter) Itay Talgam: Why not together? (Laughter) Because you didn't know when to play. Now I can tell you, even the Berlin Philharmonic doesn't know when to play. (Laughter) But I'll tell you how they do it. No cynicism. This is a German orchestra, yes? They look at Karajan. And then they look at each other. (Laughter) "Do you understand what this guy wants?" And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together. And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, "Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction. Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra." Now that's great. What about the eyes? Why are the eyes closed? There is a wonderful story about Karajan conducting in London. And he cues in a flute player like this. The guy has no idea what to do. (Laughter) "Maestro, with all due respect, when should I start?" What do you think Karajan's reply was? When should I start? Oh yeah. He says, "You start when you can't stand it anymore." (Laughter) Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything. It's my music. The real music is only in Karajan's head. And you have to guess my mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because I don't give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind. So it's a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet very firm control. Can we do it in another way? Of course we can. Let's go back to the first conductor we've seen: Carlos Kleiber, his name. Next video, please. (Music) (Laughter) Yeah. Well, it is different. But isn't that controlling in the same way? No, it's not, because he is not telling them what to do. When he does this, it's not, "Take your Stradivarius and like Jimi Hendrix, smash it on the floor." It's not that. He says, "This is the gesture of the music. I'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation." That is another story. But how does it really work together if it doesn't give them instructions? It's like being on a rollercoaster. Yeah? You're not really given any instructions, but the forces of the process itself keep you in place. That's what he does. The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist. It's not a physical thing. It's in the players' heads. And that's what makes them into partners. You have the plan in your head. You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you. But here and there and that. You know what to do. And you become a partner building the rollercoaster, yeah, with sound, as you actually take the ride. This is very exciting for those players. They do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks, later. (Laughter) It is very tiring. Yeah? But it's the best music making, like this. But of course it's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy. You also have to be very professional. And look again at this Kleiber. Can we have the next video, quickly? You'll see what happens when there is a mistake. (Music) Again you see the beautiful body language. (Music) And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done. Go along with the video. Look. See, second time for the same player. (Laughter) And now the third time for the same player. (Laughter) "Wait for me after the concert. I have a short notice to give you." You know, when it's needed, the authority is there. It's very important. But authority is not enough to make people your partners. Let's see the next video, please. See what happens here. You might be surprised having seen Kleiber as such a hyperactive guy. He's conducting Mozart. (Music) The whole orchestra is playing. (Music) Now something else. (Music) See? He is there 100 percent, but not commanding, not telling what to do. Rather enjoying what the soloist is doing. (Music) Another solo now. See what you can pick up from this. (Music) Look at the eyes. Okay. You see that? First of all, it's a kind of a compliment we all like to get. It's not feedback. It's an "Mmmm ..." Yeah, it comes from here. So that's a good thing. And the second thing is it's about actually being in control, but in a very special way. When Kleiber does — did you see the eyes, going from here? (Singing) You know what happens? Gravitation is no more. Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place. So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that. And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level. So control is no longer a zero-sum game. You have this control. You have this control. And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music. So Kleiber is about process. Kleiber is about conditions in the world. But you need to have process and content to create the meaning. Lenny Bernstein, my own personal maestro. Since he was a great teacher, Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning. Look at this, please. (Music) Do you remember the face of Muti, at the beginning? Well he had a wonderful expression, but only one. (Laughter) Did you see Lenny's face? You know why? Because the meaning of the music is pain. And you're playing a painful sound. And you look at Lenny and he's suffering. But not in a way that you want to stop. It's suffering, like, enjoying himself in a Jewish way, as they say. (Laughter) But you can see the music on his face. You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to. And Bernstein enables that. Isn't that wonderful? Now, if you are doing all the things we talked about, together, and maybe some others, you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing. And for the last video, I think this is simply the best title. My friend Peter says, "If you love something, give it away." So, please. (Music) (Applause)

1.3m reasons to re-invent the syringe

{0: 'Marc Koska wants to improve health care in the developing world by re-designing dangerous medical tools -- and offering education to practitioners in under-funded clinics.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS, the transmission of AIDS. I thought this was unacceptable. So I decided to do something about it. Sadly, it's come true. Malaria, as we all know, kills approximately one million people a year. The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year. This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe. And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out — and don't forget, their parents took them to the doctor — the parents threw them out on the street. And hence they ended up in an orphanage. And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners, blindly giving an injection to someone. And the injection is so valuable, that the people basically trust the doctor, being second to God, which I've heard many times, to do the right thing. But in fact they're not. And you can understand, obviously, the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas. This video we took undercover, which shows you, over a half an hour period, a tray of medicines of 42 vials, which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India. And over the course of half an hour, not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped. They started with two and they ended with two. And you'll see, just now, a nurse coming back to the tray, which is their sort of modular station, and dropping the syringe she's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again. So you can imagine the scale of this problem. And in fact in India alone, 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe. These kids in Pakistan don't go to school. They are lucky. They already have a job. And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals, wash them, and in the course of this, obviously picking them up they injure themselves. And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place, which is quite bizarre. In an interesting photo, their father, while we were talking to him, picked up a syringe and pricked his finger — I don't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end — and immediately whipped out a box of matches, lit one, and burned the blood off the end of his finger, giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV. In China, recycling is a major issue. And they are collected en mass — you can see the scale of it here — and sorted out, by hand, back into the right sizes, and then put back out on the street. So recycling and reuse are the major issues here. But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia. In all schools in Indonesia, there is usually a toy seller in the playground. The toy seller, in this case, had syringes, which they usually do, next door to the diggers, which is obviously what you would expect. And they use them, in the breaks, for water pistols. They squirt them at each other, which is lovely and innocent. And they are having great fun. But they also drink from them while they're in their breaks, because it's hot. And they squirt the water into their mouths. And these are used with traces of blood visible. So we need a better product. And we need better information. And I think, if I can just borrow this camera, I was going to show you my invention, which I came up with. So, it's a normal-looking syringe. You load it up in the normal way. This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license. You give the injection and then put it down. If someone then tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks afterwards. It's very, very simple. Thank you. (Applause) And it costs the same as a normal syringe. And in comparison, a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price. And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times. And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India. And we're very proud of giving information to people, so that little kids like this don't do stupid things. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Navigating our global future

{0: "Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School. Through the school's program of research, collaboration and education, he's powering new, cross-disciplinary thinking about global problems from the near and far future."}

TEDGlobal 2009

The future, as we know it, is very unpredictable. The best minds in the best institutions generally get it wrong. This is in technology. This is in the area of politics, where pundits, the CIA, MI6 always get it wrong. And it's clearly in the area of finance. With institutions established to think about the future, the IMF, the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum, couldn't see what was coming. Over 20,000 economists whose job it is, competitive entry to get there, couldn't see what was happening. Globalization is getting more complex. And this change is getting more rapid. The future will be more unpredictable. Urbanization, integration, coming together, leads to a new renaissance. It did this a thousand years ago. The last 40 years have been extraordinary times. Life expectancy has gone up by about 25 years. It took from the Stone Age to achieve that. Income has gone up for a majority of the world's population, despite the population going up by about two billion people over this period. And illiteracy has gone down, from a half to about a quarter of the people on Earth. A huge opportunity, unleashing of new potential for innovation, for development. But there is an underbelly. There are two Achilles' heels of globalization. There is the Achilles' heel of growing inequality — those that are left out, those that feel angry, those that are not participating. Globalization has not been inclusive. The second Achilles' heel is complexity — a growing fragility, a growing brittleness. What happens in one place very quickly affects everything else. This is a systemic risk, systemic shock. We've seen it in the financial crisis. We've seen it in the pandemic flu. It will become virulent and it's something we have to build resilience against. A lot of this is driven by what's happening in technology. There have been huge leaps. There will be a million-fold improvement in what you can get for the same price in computing by 2030. That's what the experience of the last 20 years has been. It will continue. Our computers, our systems will be as primitive as the Apollo's are for today. Our mobile phones are more powerful than the total Apollo space engine. Our mobile phones are more powerful than some of the strongest computers of 20 years ago. So what will this do? It will create huge opportunities in technology. Miniaturization as well. There will be invisible capacity. Invisible capacity in our bodies, in our brains, and in the air. This is a dust mite on a nanoreplica. This sort of ability to do everything in new ways unleashes potential, not least in the area of medicine. This is a stem cell that we've developed here in Oxford, from an embryonic stem cell. We can develop any part of the body. Increasingly, over time, this will be possible from our own skin — able to replicate parts of the body. Fantastic potential for regenerative medicine. I don't think there will be a Special Olympics long after 2030, because of this capacity to regenerate parts of the body. But the question is, "Who will have it?" The other major development is going to be in the area of what can happen in genetics. The capacity to create, as this mouse has been genetically modified, something which goes three times faster, lasts for three times longer, we could produce, as this mouse can, to the age of our equivalent of 80 years, using about the same amount of food. But will this only be available for the super rich, for those that can afford it? Are we headed for a new eugenics? Will only those that are able to afford it be able to be this super race of the future? (Laughter) So the big question for us is, "How do we manage this technological change?" How do we ensure that it creates a more inclusive technology, a technology which means that not only as we grow older, that we can also grow wiser, and that we're able to support the populations of the future? One of the most dramatic manifestations of these improvements will be moving from population pyramids to what we might term population coffins. There is unlikely to be a pension or a retirement age in 2030. These will be redundant concepts. And this isn't only something of the West. The most dramatic changes will be the skyscraper type of new pyramids that will take place in China and in many other countries. So forget about retirements if you're young. Forget about pensions. Think about life and where it's going to be going. Of course, migration will become even more important. The war on talent, the need to attract people at all skill ranges, to push us around in our wheelchairs, but also to drive our economies. Our innovation will be vital. The employment in the rich countries will go down from about 800 to about 700 million of these people. This would imply a massive leap in migration. So the concerns, the xenophobic concerns of today, of migration, will be turned on their head, as we search for people to help us sort out our pensions and our economies in the future. And then, the systemic risks. We understand that these will become much more virulent, that what we see today is this interweaving of societies, of systems, fastened by technologies and hastened by just-in-time management systems. Small levels of stock push resilience into other people's responsibility. The collapse in biodiversity, climate change, pandemics, financial crises: these will be the currency that we will think about. And so a new awareness will have to arise, of how we deal with these, how we mobilize ourselves, in a new way, and come together as a community to manage systemic risk. It's going to require innovation. It's going to require an understanding that the glory of globalization could also be its downfall. This could be our best century ever because of the achievements, or it could be our worst. And of course we need to worry about the individuals, particularly the individuals that feel that they've been left out in one way or another. An individual, for the first time in the history of humanity, will have the capacity, by 2030, to destroy the planet, to wreck everything, through the creation, for example, of a biopathogen. How do we begin to weave these tapestries together? How do we think about complex systems in new ways? That will be the challenge of the scholars, and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future. The rest of our lives will be in the future. We need to prepare for it now. We need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized. It cannot begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring. We have to develop a new way of managing the planet, collectively, through collective wisdom. We know, and I know from my own experience, that amazing things can happen, when individuals and societies come together to change their future. I left South Africa, and 15 years later, after thinking I would never go back, I had the privilege and the honor to work in the government of Nelson Mandela. This was a miracle. We can create miracles, collectively, in our lifetime. It is vital that we do so. It is vital that the ideas that are nurtured in TED, that the ideas that we think about look forward, and make sure that this will be the most glorious century, and not one of eco-disaster and eco-collapse. Thank you. (Applause)

A new way to explain explanation

{0: 'A pioneer in quantum computation and quantum information theory, David Deutsch now seeks to define the boundaries between the possible and the impossible.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'm sure that, throughout the 100,000-odd years of our species' existence and even before, our ancestors looked up at the night sky and wondered what stars are — wondering, therefore, how to explain what they saw in terms of things unseen. OK, so, most people only wondered that occasionally, like today, in breaks from whatever normally preoccupied them. But what normally preoccupied them also involved yearning to know. They wished they knew how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing, and how they could rest when they were tired without risking starvation, be warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain. I bet those prehistoric cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better. (Laughter) In every aspect of their lives, they wished for progress, just as we do. But they failed, almost completely, to make any. They didn't know how to. Discoveries like fire happened so rarely that, from an individual's point of view, the world never improved. Nothing new was learned. The first clue to the origin of starlight happened as recently as 1899: radioactivity. And within 40 years, physicists discovered the whole explanation, expressed, as usual, in elegant symbols. But never mind the symbols. Think how many discoveries they represent. Nuclei and nuclear reactions, of course. But isotopes, particles of electricity, antimatter, neutrinos, the conversion of mass to energy — that's E=mc2 — gamma rays, transmutation. That ancient dream that had always eluded the alchemists was achieved through these same theories that explained starlight and other ancient mysteries and new, unexpected phenomena. That all that, discovered in 40 years, had not been in the previous hundred thousand was not for lack of thinking about stars and all those other urgent problems they had. They even arrived at answers, such as myths, that dominated their lives, yet bore almost no resemblance to the truth. The tragedy of that protracted stagnation isn't sufficiently recognized, I think. These were people with brains of essentially the same design that eventually did discover all those things. But that ability to make progress remained almost unused, until the event that revolutionized the human condition and changed the universe. Or so we should hope, because that event was the scientific revolution, ever since which our knowledge of the physical world and of how to adapt it to our wishes has been growing relentlessly. Now, what had changed? What were people now doing for the first time that made that difference between stagnation and rapid, open-ended discovery? How to make that difference is surely the most important universal truth that it's possible to know. And worryingly, there's no consensus about what it is. So, I'll tell you. (Laughter) But I'll have to backtrack a little first. Before the scientific revolution, they believed that everything important, knowable, was already known, enshrined in ancient writings, institutions and in some genuinely useful rules of thumb — which were, however, entrenched as dogmas, along with many falsehoods. So, they believed that knowledge came from authorities that actually knew very little. And therefore, progress depended on learning how to reject the authority of learned men, the priests, traditions and rulers, which is why the scientific revolution had to have a wider context: the Enlightenment, a revolution in how people sought knowledge, trying not to rely on authority. "Take no one's word for it." But that can't be what made the difference. Authorities had been rejected before, many times. And that rarely, if ever, caused anything like the scientific revolution. At the time, what they thought distinguished science was a radical idea about things unseen, known as empiricism — all knowledge derives from the senses. Well, we've seen that that can't be true. It did help by promoting observation and experiment. But, from the outset, it was obvious that there was something horribly wrong with it. Knowledge comes from the senses? In what language? Certainly not the language of mathematics, in which, Galileo rightly said, the book of nature is written. Look at the world. You don't see equations carved on the mountainsides. If you did, it would be because people had carved them. By the way, why don't we do that? (Laughter) What's wrong with us? (Laughter) Empiricism is inadequate because, well, scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen. And the unseen, you have to admit, doesn't come to us through the senses. We don't see those nuclear reactions in stars. We don't see the origin of species. We don't see the curvature of space-time, and other universes. But we know about those things. How? Well, the classic empiricist answer is induction — the unseen resembles the seen. But it doesn't. You know what the clinching evidence was that space-time is curved? It was a photograph — not of space-time, but of an eclipse, with a dot there rather than there. And the evidence for evolution? Some rocks and some finches. And parallel universes? Again: dots there rather than there, on a screen. What we see in all these cases bears no resemblance to the reality that we conclude is responsible — only a long chain of theoretical reasoning and interpretation connects them. "Ah!" say creationists. "So you admit it's all interpretation. No one's ever seen evolution. We see rocks. You have your interpretation. We have ours. Yours comes from guesswork; ours, from the Bible." But what creationist and empiricists both ignore is that, in that sense, no one's ever seen a Bible either, that the eye only detects light, which we don't perceive. Brains only detect nerve impulses. And they don't perceive even those as what they really are, namely electrical crackles. So we perceive nothing as what it really is. Our connection to reality is never just perception. It's always, as Karl Popper put it, theory-laden. Scientific knowledge isn't derived from anything. Like all knowledge, it's conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it. So, were testable conjectures the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates? No, contrary to what's usually said, testability is common in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking. Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction. Consider the ancient Greek myth explaining seasons. Hades, god of the underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the goddess of spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. And each year, she is magically compelled to return. And her mother, Demeter, goddess of the earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren. That myth is testable. If winter is caused by Demeter's sadness, then it must happen everywhere on earth simultaneously. So if the ancient Greeks had only known that Australia is at its warmest when Demeter is at her saddest ... (Laughter) they'd have known that their theory is false. (Laughter) So, what was wrong with that myth and with all prescientific thinking? And what, then, made that momentous difference? I think there's one thing you have to care about and that implies testability, the scientific method, the Enlightenment and everything. And here's the crucial thing: there is such a thing as a defect in a story. I don't just mean a logical defect. I mean a bad explanation. What does that mean? Well, an explanation is an assertion about what's there, unseen, that accounts for what's seen; because the explanatory role of Persephone's marriage contract could be played equally well by infinitely many other ad hoc entities. Why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual action? Here's one: Persephone wasn't released. She escaped, and returns every spring to take revenge on Hades, with her spring powers. She cools his domain with spring air, venting heat up to the surface, creating summer. That accounts for the same phenomena as the original myth. It's equally testable. Yet what it asserts about reality is, in many ways, the opposite. And that's possible because the details of the original myth are unrelated to seasons, except via the myth itself. This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them in preference to the others is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can't be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena. Now our current explanation of seasons is that the Earth's axis is tilted like that, so each hemisphere tilts towards the sun for half the year, and away for the other half. [Not to scale!] Better put that up. (Laughter) That's a good explanation: hard to vary, because every detail plays a functional role. For instance, we know, independently of seasons, that surfaces tilted away from radiant heat are heated less, and that a spinning sphere, in space, points in a constant direction. And the tilt also explains the sun's angle of elevation at different times of year, and predicts that the seasons will be out of phase in the two hemispheres. If they'd been observed in phase, the theory would have been refuted. But now, the fact that it's also a good explanation, hard to vary, makes the crucial difference. If the ancient Greeks had found out about seasons in Australia, they could have easily varied their myth to predict that. For instance, when Demeter's upset, she banishes heat from her vicinity into the other hemisphere, where it makes summer. So, being proved wrong by observation and changing their theory accordingly still wouldn't have got the ancient Greeks one jot closer to understanding seasons, because their explanation was bad — easy to vary. And it's only when an explanation is good that it even matters whether it's testable. If the axis-tilt theory had been refuted, its defenders would have had nowhere to go. No easily implemented change could make that tilt cause the same seasons in both hemispheres. The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. It's the basic regulating principle of the Enlightenment. So, in science, two false approaches blight progress. One's well-known: untestable theories. But the more important one is explanationless theories. Whenever you're told that some existing statistical trend will continue but you aren't given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you're being told a wizard did it. When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes, but not how gene percentages confer rights — wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there's evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing. They're saying that our opinions are caused by wizards, and presumably, so are their own. (Laughter) That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary. Thank you. (Applause)

Architecture that repairs itself?

{0: 'TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong is a sustainability innovator who creates new materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can be manipulated to "grow" architecture.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

All buildings today have something in common. They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All of this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it. Now, in order to do this, we need the right kind of language. Living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world, through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism. And this is the conversion of one group of substances into another, either through the production or the absorption of energy. And this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way. So, I'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture. But they don't exist. So I'm having to make them. I'm working with architect Neil Spiller at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and we're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach. That means we're generating them from scratch. One of our collaborators is chemist Martin Hanczyc, and he's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter. Now, that's exactly the kind of process that I'm interested in, when we're thinking about sustainable materials. So, Martin, he works with a system called the protocell. Now all this is — and it's magic — is a little fatty bag. And it's got a chemical battery in it. And it has no DNA. This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living. It is able to move around its environment. It can follow chemical gradients. It can undergo complex reactions, some of which are happily architectural. So here we are. These are protocells, patterning their environment. We don't know how they do that yet. Here, this is a protocell, and it's vigorously shedding this skin. Now, this looks like a chemical kind of birth. This is a violent process. Here, we've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate. And that's the shell around that globular fat. They are quite brittle. So you've only got a part of one there. So what we're trying to do is, we're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture, which contrast the current, Victorian, top-down methods which impose structure upon matter. That can't be energetically sensible. So, bottom-up materials actually exist today. They've been in use, in architecture, since ancient times. If you walk around the city of Oxford, where we are today, and have a look at the brickwork, which I've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days, you'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone. And if you look even closer, you'll see, in that limestone, there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other. And then they are fossilized over millions of years. Now a block of limestone, in itself, isn't particularly that interesting. It looks beautiful. But imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere. Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide. Would it give this block of limestone new properties? Well, most likely it would. It might be able to grow. It might be able to self-repair, and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment. So, architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material. They think big. Okay? So when we think about scaling up metabolic materials, we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls, or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water. So, one of these examples would of course be the historic city of Venice. Now, Venice, as you know, has a tempestuous relationship with the sea, and is built upon wooden piles. So we've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we're working with to sustainably reclaim Venice. And architect Christian Kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city. So, here is the technology we have today. This is our protocell technology, effectively making a shell, like its limestone forefathers, and depositing it in a very complex environment, against natural materials. We're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this. Now, this is the very interesting part. We don't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals. What we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles. So, you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light, toward the dark foundations. We've observed this in the laboratory. The protocells can actually move away from the light. They can actually also move towards the light. You have to just choose your species. So that these don't just exist as one entity, we kind of chemically engineer them. And so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically, around the foundations of Venice, effectively petrifying it. Now, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's going to take a while. It's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of Venice. But gradually, as the buildings are repaired, we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city. An accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide. Also it will attract the local marine ecology, who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture. So, this is really interesting. Now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way. But perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere. This is terrestrial chemistry. We've all got it, which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for First World countries. So, in summary, I'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to Victorian technologies, and building architectures from a bottom-up approach. Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one. Thank you. (Applause)

The year I was homeless

{0: 'Becky Blanton is a writer, photographer and former journalist who found herself homeless, but bounced back to tell her story and inspire others. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'm a writer and a journalist, and I'm also an insanely curious person, so in 22 years as a journalist, I've learned how to do a lot of new things. And three years ago, one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible. I became one of the working homeless. I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year, and decided to travel. His death hit me pretty hard. And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that. I've camped my whole life. And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip. So I packed my cat, my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle. At first, living in the van was great. I showered in campgrounds. I ate out regularly. And I had time to relax and to grieve. But then the anger and the depression about my father's death set in. My freelance job ended. And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills. What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer. And it became impossible to park anywhere — (Laughs) — without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me, and it was really hot. The cat came and went through an open window in the van. The doggy went into doggy day care. And I sweated. Whenever I could, I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops. Or I washed up in public rest rooms. Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making it difficult or impossible to sleep. Food rotted in the heat. Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable. I couldn't afford to find an apartment, or couldn't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat. And I refused to give them up, so I stayed in the van. And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet. When winter weather set in, the temperatures dropped below freezing. And they stayed there. And I faced a whole new set of challenges. I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police. I didn't always succeed. But I felt out of control of my life. And I don't know when or how it happened, but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman, living in a van, took my breath away. I hadn't changed. My I.Q. hadn't dropped. My talent, my integrity, my values, everything about me remained the same. But I had changed somehow. I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression. And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. And I went. I hadn't bathed in three days. I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line. I just wasn't drunk or high. And when several of the homeless men realized that, including a former university professor, they said, "You aren't homeless. Why are you really here?" Other homeless people didn't see me as homeless, but I did. Then the professor listened to my story and he said, "You have a job. You have hope. The real homeless don't have hope." A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal. And I remember thinking, "If I killed myself, no one would notice." A friend told me, shortly after that, that she had heard that Tim Russert, a nationally renowned journalist, had been talking about me on national T.V. An essay I'd written about my father, the year before he died, was in Tim's new book. And he was doing the talk show circuit. And he was talking about my writing. And when I realized that Tim Russert, former moderator of "Meet the Press," was talking about my writing, while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I started laughing. You should too. (Laughter) I started laughing because it got to the point where, was I a writer, or was I a homeless woman? So I went in the bookstore. And I found Tim's book. And I stood there. And I reread my essay. And I cried. Because I was a writer. I was a writer. Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee. I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends. And I started writing again. By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist. I was winning awards. I was living in my own apartment. I was no longer homeless. And I was no longer invisible. Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs, and live in their cars. But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets. So the homeless, the working homeless, primarily remain invisible. But if you ever meet one, engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. And I'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless. I'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet. But I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time. Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and today I'm speaking at TED. Hope always, always finds a way. Thank you. (Applause)

Symmetry, reality's riddle

{0: "Oxford's newest science ambassador Marcus du Sautoy is also author of <i>The Times</i>' Sexy Maths column. He'll take you footballing with prime numbers, whopping symmetry groups, higher dimensions and other brow-furrowers."}

TEDGlobal 2009

On the 30th of May, 1832, a gunshot was heard ringing out across the 13th arrondissement in Paris. (Gunshot) A peasant, who was walking to market that morning, ran towards where the gunshot had come from, and found a young man writhing in agony on the floor, clearly shot by a dueling wound. The young man's name was Evariste Galois. He was a well-known revolutionary in Paris at the time. Galois was taken to the local hospital where he died the next day in the arms of his brother. And the last words he said to his brother were, "Don't cry for me, Alfred. I need all the courage I can muster to die at the age of 20." It wasn't, in fact, revolutionary politics for which Galois was famous. But a few years earlier, while still at school, he'd actually cracked one of the big mathematical problems at the time. And he wrote to the academicians in Paris, trying to explain his theory. But the academicians couldn't understand anything that he wrote. (Laughter) This is how he wrote most of his mathematics. So, the night before that duel, he realized this possibly is his last chance to try and explain his great breakthrough. So he stayed up the whole night, writing away, trying to explain his ideas. And as the dawn came up and he went to meet his destiny, he left this pile of papers on the table for the next generation. Maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the fact that he was such a bad shot that morning and got killed. But contained inside those documents was a new language, a language to understand one of the most fundamental concepts of science — namely symmetry. Now, symmetry is almost nature's language. It helps us to understand so many different bits of the scientific world. For example, molecular structure. What crystals are possible, we can understand through the mathematics of symmetry. In microbiology you really don't want to get a symmetrical object, because they are generally rather nasty. The swine flu virus, at the moment, is a symmetrical object. And it uses the efficiency of symmetry to be able to propagate itself so well. But on a larger scale of biology, actually symmetry is very important, because it actually communicates genetic information. I've taken two pictures here and I've made them artificially symmetrical. And if I ask you which of these you find more beautiful, you're probably drawn to the lower two. Because it is hard to make symmetry. And if you can make yourself symmetrical, you're sending out a sign that you've got good genes, you've got a good upbringing and therefore you'll make a good mate. So symmetry is a language which can help to communicate genetic information. Symmetry can also help us to explain what's happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Or what's not happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. To be able to make predictions about the fundamental particles we might see there, it seems that they are all facets of some strange symmetrical shape in a higher dimensional space. And I think Galileo summed up, very nicely, the power of mathematics to understand the scientific world around us. He wrote, "The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word." But it's not just scientists who are interested in symmetry. Artists too love to play around with symmetry. They also have a slightly more ambiguous relationship with it. Here is Thomas Mann talking about symmetry in "The Magic Mountain." He has a character describing the snowflake, and he says he "shuddered at its perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death." But what artists like to do is to set up expectations of symmetry and then break them. And a beautiful example of this I found, actually, when I visited a colleague of mine in Japan, Professor Kurokawa. And he took me up to the temples in Nikko. And just after this photo was taken we walked up the stairs. And the gateway you see behind has eight columns, with beautiful symmetrical designs on them. Seven of them are exactly the same, and the eighth one is turned upside down. And I said to Professor Kurokawa, "Wow, the architects must have really been kicking themselves when they realized that they'd made a mistake and put this one upside down." And he said, "No, no, no. It was a very deliberate act." And he referred me to this lovely quote from the Japanese "Essays in Idleness" from the 14th century, in which the essayist wrote, "In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Even when building the Imperial Palace, they always leave one place unfinished. But if I had to choose one building in the world to be cast out on a desert island, to live the rest of my life, being an addict of symmetry, I would probably choose the Alhambra in Granada. This is a palace celebrating symmetry. Recently I took my family — we do these rather kind of nerdy mathematical trips, which my family love. This is my son Tamer. You can see he's really enjoying our mathematical trip to the Alhambra. But I wanted to try and enrich him. I think one of the problems about school mathematics is it doesn't look at how mathematics is embedded in the world we live in. So, I wanted to open his eyes up to how much symmetry is running through the Alhambra. You see it already. Immediately you go in, the reflective symmetry in the water. But it's on the walls where all the exciting things are happening. The Moorish artists were denied the possibility to draw things with souls. So they explored a more geometric art. And so what is symmetry? The Alhambra somehow asks all of these questions. What is symmetry? When [there] are two of these walls, do they have the same symmetries? Can we say whether they discovered all of the symmetries in the Alhambra? And it was Galois who produced a language to be able to answer some of these questions. For Galois, symmetry — unlike for Thomas Mann, which was something still and deathly — for Galois, symmetry was all about motion. What can you do to a symmetrical object, move it in some way, so it looks the same as before you moved it? I like to describe it as the magic trick moves. What can you do to something? You close your eyes. I do something, put it back down again. It looks like it did before it started. So, for example, the walls in the Alhambra — I can take all of these tiles, and fix them at the yellow place, rotate them by 90 degrees, put them all back down again and they fit perfectly down there. And if you open your eyes again, you wouldn't know that they'd moved. But it's the motion that really characterizes the symmetry inside the Alhambra. But it's also about producing a language to describe this. And the power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language. So I'm going to take you through, perhaps push you a little bit mathematically — so brace yourselves — push you a little bit to understand how this language works, which enables us to capture what is symmetry. So, let's take these two symmetrical objects here. Let's take the twisted six-pointed starfish. What can I do to the starfish which makes it look the same? Well, there I rotated it by a sixth of a turn, and still it looks like it did before I started. I could rotate it by a third of a turn, or a half a turn, or put it back down on its image, or two thirds of a turn. And a fifth symmetry, I can rotate it by five sixths of a turn. And those are things that I can do to the symmetrical object that make it look like it did before I started. Now, for Galois, there was actually a sixth symmetry. Can anybody think what else I could do to this which would leave it like I did before I started? I can't flip it because I've put a little twist on it, haven't I? It's got no reflective symmetry. But what I could do is just leave it where it is, pick it up, and put it down again. And for Galois this was like the zeroth symmetry. Actually, the invention of the number zero was a very modern concept, seventh century A.D., by the Indians. It seems mad to talk about nothing. And this is the same idea. This is a symmetrical — so everything has symmetry, where you just leave it where it is. So, this object has six symmetries. And what about the triangle? Well, I can rotate by a third of a turn clockwise or a third of a turn anticlockwise. But now this has some reflectional symmetry. I can reflect it in the line through X, or the line through Y, or the line through Z. Five symmetries and then of course the zeroth symmetry where I just pick it up and leave it where it is. So both of these objects have six symmetries. Now, I'm a great believer that mathematics is not a spectator sport, and you have to do some mathematics in order to really understand it. So here is a little question for you. And I'm going to give a prize at the end of my talk for the person who gets closest to the answer. The Rubik's Cube. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? How many things can I do to this object and put it down so it still looks like a cube? Okay? So I want you to think about that problem as we go on, and count how many symmetries there are. And there will be a prize for the person who gets closest at the end. But let's go back down to symmetries that I got for these two objects. What Galois realized: it isn't just the individual symmetries, but how they interact with each other which really characterizes the symmetry of an object. If I do one magic trick move followed by another, the combination is a third magic trick move. And here we see Galois starting to develop a language to see the substance of the things unseen, the sort of abstract idea of the symmetry underlying this physical object. For example, what if I turn the starfish by a sixth of a turn, and then a third of a turn? So I've given names. The capital letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, are the names for the rotations. B, for example, rotates the little yellow dot to the B on the starfish. And so on. So what if I do B, which is a sixth of a turn, followed by C, which is a third of a turn? Well let's do that. A sixth of a turn, followed by a third of a turn, the combined effect is as if I had just rotated it by half a turn in one go. So the little table here records how the algebra of these symmetries work. I do one followed by another, the answer is it's rotation D, half a turn. What I if I did it in the other order? Would it make any difference? Let's see. Let's do the third of the turn first, and then the sixth of a turn. Of course, it doesn't make any difference. It still ends up at half a turn. And there is some symmetry here in the way the symmetries interact with each other. But this is completely different to the symmetries of the triangle. Let's see what happens if we do two symmetries with the triangle, one after the other. Let's do a rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise, and reflect in the line through X. Well, the combined effect is as if I had just done the reflection in the line through Z to start with. Now, let's do it in a different order. Let's do the reflection in X first, followed by the rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise. The combined effect, the triangle ends up somewhere completely different. It's as if it was reflected in the line through Y. Now it matters what order you do the operations in. And this enables us to distinguish why the symmetries of these objects — they both have six symmetries. So why shouldn't we say they have the same symmetries? But the way the symmetries interact enable us — we've now got a language to distinguish why these symmetries are fundamentally different. And you can try this when you go down to the pub, later on. Take a beer mat and rotate it by a quarter of a turn, then flip it. And then do it in the other order, and the picture will be facing in the opposite direction. Now, Galois produced some laws for how these tables — how symmetries interact. It's almost like little Sudoku tables. You don't see any symmetry twice in any row or column. And, using those rules, he was able to say that there are in fact only two objects with six symmetries. And they'll be the same as the symmetries of the triangle, or the symmetries of the six-pointed starfish. I think this is an amazing development. It's almost like the concept of number being developed for symmetry. In the front here, I've got one, two, three people sitting on one, two, three chairs. The people and the chairs are very different, but the number, the abstract idea of the number, is the same. And we can see this now: we go back to the walls in the Alhambra. Here are two very different walls, very different geometric pictures. But, using the language of Galois, we can understand that the underlying abstract symmetries of these things are actually the same. For example, let's take this beautiful wall with the triangles with a little twist on them. You can rotate them by a sixth of a turn if you ignore the colors. We're not matching up the colors. But the shapes match up if I rotate by a sixth of a turn around the point where all the triangles meet. What about the center of a triangle? I can rotate by a third of a turn around the center of the triangle, and everything matches up. And then there is an interesting place halfway along an edge, where I can rotate by 180 degrees. And all the tiles match up again. So rotate along halfway along the edge, and they all match up. Now, let's move to the very different-looking wall in the Alhambra. And we find the same symmetries here, and the same interaction. So, there was a sixth of a turn. A third of a turn where the Z pieces meet. And the half a turn is halfway between the six pointed stars. And although these walls look very different, Galois has produced a language to say that in fact the symmetries underlying these are exactly the same. And it's a symmetry we call 6-3-2. Here is another example in the Alhambra. This is a wall, a ceiling, and a floor. They all look very different. But this language allows us to say that they are representations of the same symmetrical abstract object, which we call 4-4-2. Nothing to do with football, but because of the fact that there are two places where you can rotate by a quarter of a turn, and one by half a turn. Now, this power of the language is even more, because Galois can say, "Did the Moorish artists discover all of the possible symmetries on the walls in the Alhambra?" And it turns out they almost did. You can prove, using Galois' language, there are actually only 17 different symmetries that you can do in the walls in the Alhambra. And they, if you try to produce a different wall with this 18th one, it will have to have the same symmetries as one of these 17. But these are things that we can see. And the power of Galois' mathematical language is it also allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world, beyond the two-dimensional, three-dimensional, all the way through to the four- or five- or infinite-dimensional space. And that's where I work. I create mathematical objects, symmetrical objects, using Galois' language, in very high dimensional spaces. So I think it's a great example of things unseen, which the power of mathematical language allows you to create. So, like Galois, I stayed up all last night creating a new mathematical symmetrical object for you, and I've got a picture of it here. Well, unfortunately it isn't really a picture. If I could have my board at the side here, great, excellent. Here we are. Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture of this symmetrical object. But here is the language which describes how the symmetries interact. Now, this new symmetrical object does not have a name yet. Now, people like getting their names on things, on craters on the moon or new species of animals. So I'm going to give you the chance to get your name on a new symmetrical object which hasn't been named before. And this thing — species die away, and moons kind of get hit by meteors and explode — but this mathematical object will live forever. It will make you immortal. In order to win this symmetrical object, what you have to do is to answer the question I asked you at the beginning. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? Okay, I'm going to sort you out. Rather than you all shouting out, I want you to count how many digits there are in that number. Okay? If you've got it as a factorial, you've got to expand the factorials. Okay, now if you want to play, I want you to stand up, okay? If you think you've got an estimate for how many digits, right — we've already got one competitor here. If you all stay down he wins it automatically. Okay. Excellent. So we've got four here, five, six. Great. Excellent. That should get us going. All right. Anybody with five or less digits, you've got to sit down, because you've underestimated. Five or less digits. So, if you're in the tens of thousands you've got to sit down. 60 digits or more, you've got to sit down. You've overestimated. 20 digits or less, sit down. How many digits are there in your number? Two? So you should have sat down earlier. (Laughter) Let's have the other ones, who sat down during the 20, up again. Okay? If I told you 20 or less, stand up. Because this one. I think there were a few here. The people who just last sat down. Okay, how many digits do you have in your number? (Laughs) 21. Okay good. How many do you have in yours? 18. So it goes to this lady here. 21 is the closest. It actually has — the number of symmetries in the Rubik's cube has 25 digits. So now I need to name this object. So, what is your name? I need your surname. Symmetrical objects generally — spell it for me. G-H-E-Z No, SO2 has already been used, actually, in the mathematical language. So you can't have that one. So Ghez, there we go. That's your new symmetrical object. You are now immortal. (Applause) And if you'd like your own symmetrical object, I have a project raising money for a charity in Guatemala, where I will stay up all night and devise an object for you, for a donation to this charity to help kids get into education in Guatemala. And I think what drives me, as a mathematician, are those things which are not seen, the things that we haven't discovered. It's all the unanswered questions which make mathematics a living subject. And I will always come back to this quote from the Japanese "Essays in Idleness": "In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Thank you. (Applause)

How the Internet enables intimacy

{0: 'Stefana Broadbent watches us while we communicate, work and go about our daily lives. She is one of a new class of ethnographers who study the way our social habits and relationships function and mutate in the digital age.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I believe that there are new, hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions — institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life: schools, hospitals, workplaces, factories, offices, etc. And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of "democratization of intimacy." And what do I mean by that? I mean that what people are doing is, in fact, they are sort of, with their communication channels, they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them. How are they doing this? They're doing it in a very simple way, by calling their mom from work, by IMing from their office to their friends, by texting under the desk. The pictures that you're seeing behind me are people that I visited in the last few months. And I asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most. And somebody brought a boyfriend, somebody a father. One young woman brought her grandfather. For 20 years, I've been looking at how people use channels such as email, the mobile phone, texting, etc. What we're actually going to see is that, fundamentally, people are communicating on a regular basis with five, six, seven of their most intimate sphere. Now, lets take some data. Facebook. Recently some sociologists from Facebook — Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels. And an average user, said Cameron Marlow, from Facebook, has about 120 friends. But he actually talks to, has two-way exchanges with, about four to six people on a regular base, depending on his gender. Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists, but fundamentally people chat with two, three, four — anyway, less than five. My own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people. 80 percent. And when you go to Skype, it's down to two people. A lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed. I mean, I've been a bit disappointed sometimes when I saw this data and all this deployment, just for five people. And some sociologists actually feel that it's a closure, it's a cocooning, that we're disengaging from the public. And I would actually, I would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it, and from where they're doing it, actually there is an incredible social transformation. There are three stories that I think are quite good examples. The first gentleman, he's a baker. And so he starts working every morning at four o'clock in the morning. And around eight o'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven, cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife. He just wants to wish her a good day, because that's the start of her day. And I've heard this story a number of times. A young factory worker who works night shifts, who manages to sneak away from the factory floor, where there is CCTV by the way, and find a corner, where at 11 o'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight. Or a mother who, at four o'clock, suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home. Then there is another couple, there is a Brazilian couple. They've lived in Italy for a number of years. They Skype with their families a few times a week. But once a fortnight, they actually put the computer on their dining table, pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in Sao Paulo. And they have a big event of it. And I heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from Kosovo in Switzerland. They had set up a big screen in their living room, and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother. But Danny Miller, who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines, was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype, and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype. And then there is the third couple. They are two friends. They chat to each other every day, a few times a day actually. And finally, finally, they've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work. And now, obviously, they have it open. Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other. And this is exactly what we've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school, under the table, and texting under the table to their friends. So, none of these cases are unique. I mean, I could tell you hundreds of them. But what is really exceptional is the setting. So, think of the three settings I've talked to you about: factory, migration, office. But it could be in a school, it could be an administration, it could be a hospital. Three settings that, if we just step back 15 years, if you just think back 15 years, when you clocked in, when you clocked in to an office, when you clocked in to a factory, there was no contact for the whole duration of the time, there was no contact with your private sphere. If you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere. If you were in management, oh, that was a different story. Maybe you had a direct line. If you were not, you maybe had to go through an operator. But basically, when you walked into those buildings, the private sphere was left behind you. And this has become such a norm of our professional lives, such a norm and such an expectation. And it had nothing to do with technical capability. The phones were there. But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand, fully to the people around you. That was where the focus had to be. And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage. If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. And then the school enacts perfectly well. It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices: rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention. This only started about 150 years ago. It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution. When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. They were living on top of the land they were laboring. They were living on top of the workshops where they were working. And if you think, it's permeated our whole culture, even our cities. If you think of medieval cities, medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there. Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas. And actually, over these 150 years, there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged. So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out, the more removed he would be from his personal sphere. People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. And they are doing it massively. The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that — and I think that this number is conservative — 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office. I really think that the number is conservative. In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o'clock in the morning, whatever the country. 75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. 100 percent are using text. The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions. I'm always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance, of soldiers in Iraq having daily contact with their families. But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access. And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a $15 fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy.

The refugees of boom-and-bust

{0: "2006 TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair is co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks architecture solutions to global crises -- and acts as a conduit between the design community and the world's humanitarian needs."}

TED2009

A few years ago, my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry. In 2006, young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps. And since then I've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights. In the last six months, more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled. Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker. 1.1 million of them. Mainly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepalese, these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home. They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there. And when they arrive, they find themselves in labor camps with no water, no air conditioning, and their passports taken away. While it's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities, 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector, and so therefore we're equally, if not more, accountable. Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged, but the numbers are simply overwhelming. In August 2008, UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations. And last summer, more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages, for the poor quality of food, and inadequate housing. And then the financial collapse happened. When the contractors have gone bust, as they've been overleveraged like everyone else, the difference is everything goes missing, documentation, passports, and tickets home for these workers. Currently, right now, thousands of workers are abandoned. There is no way back home. And there is no way, and no proof of arrival. These are the boom-and-bust refugees. The question is, as a building professional, as an architect, an engineer, as a developer, if you know this is going on, as we go to the sights every single week, are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations? So let's forget your environmental footprint. Let's think about your ethical footprint. What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best? Now, recently I've been told I've been taking the high road. But, quite frankly, on this issue, there is no other road. So let's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse. And that as we worry about our next job in the office, the next design that we can get, to keep our workers. Let's not forget these men, who are truly dying to work. Thank you. (Applause)

The science behind a climate headline

{0: 'Rachel Pike studies climate change at the molecular level -- tracking how emissions from biofuel crops react with the air to shape weather trends globally.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change; and like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. They're two branches of the same field of atmospheric science. Recently, the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries. They wrote almost 1,000 pages on the topic, and all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers from 113 countries. It's a big community; such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world. Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. Every one of those scientists is in a research group, and every research group studies a wide variety of topics. For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Niño Oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels, which is what I study. And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students, like me, and we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule. You've probably never heard of it. The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion — 10 to the 21st — molecules of isoprene. But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane. And because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system. Because it's important to the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. We blow it up and look at the pieces. This is the EUPHORE Smog Chamber in Spain. Atmospheric explosions, or full combustion, takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car. But still, we look at the pieces. We run enormous models on supercomputers; this is what I happen to do. Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each, on minute timescales. It takes weeks to perform our integrations, and we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what's happening. We also fly all over the world looking for this thing. I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia — there are others. We found a global atmospheric watchtower there in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene and other things while we were there. This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest from above, and the tower from below. On part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us. And this plane, the model BAe-146, which was run by FAAM, normally flies 120 to 130 people, so maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today. But we didn't just fly it. We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule — incredibly dangerous stuff. We have to fly at a special incline to make the measurements; we hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering; we need special flight clearance. As you come around the banks in these valleys, the forces can get up to two Gs; the scientists must be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while on board. So as you can imagine, the inside of the aircraft doesn't look like one you'd take on vacation. It's a flying laboratory we took to make measurements of this molecule. We do all this to understand the chemistry of one molecule. And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule, they write one scientific paper on the subject. And out of that field campaign we'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules. As a body of knowledge builds up, it will form one subsection, or one sub-subsection, of an assessment like the IPCC, although we have others. And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections. So you can imagine the scale of the effort. In each one of the assessments we write, we always tag on a summary, and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience. And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers in order to make headlines like these. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Photographing the landscape of oil

{0: "2005 TED Prize winner Edward Burtynsky has made it his life's work to document humanity's impact on the planet. His riveting photographs, as beautiful as they are horrifying, capture views of the Earth altered by mankind."}

TEDGlobal 2009

I started my journey 30 years ago. And I worked in mines. And I realized that this was a world unseen. And I wanted, through color and large format cameras and very large prints, to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape, how we use the land. And to me this was a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography, which allows us to contemplate these landscapes, that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work. And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes, it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed. Because that is what has changed, is the speed at which we're taking all our resources. And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil. And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction, where we're taking it from the ground, refinement. And that's one chapter. The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it — our cities, our cars, our motorcultures, where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration. And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil, this entropic end, where all of our parts of cars, our tires, oil filters, helicopters, planes — where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up? And to me, again, photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world, and find those places. And another idea that I had as well, that was brought forward by an ecologist — he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said, well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material? It was 23 metric tons for one liter. So whenever I fill up my gas, I think of that liter, and how much carbon. And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy. From the photosynthetic growth, it would take 500 years of that growth to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year. And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society. Looking at 30 billion per year, we look at our two largest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil. And together they only form about 15 years of supply. The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves, only gives us about 45 years. So, it's not a question of if, but a question of when peak oil will come upon us. So, to me, using photography — and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents, our ways of thinking, to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis. And I would like to say that, on the other side of it, 30, 40 years from now, the children that I have, I can look at them and say, "We did everything we possibly, humanly could do, to begin to mitigate this, what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time. Thank you. (Applause)

The surprising spread of Idol TV

{0: 'Cynthia Schneider studies culture and politics -- watching how novels, TV shows and cultural engagement around the globe (and especially within the Muslim world) might lead to political change. She was the US ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998 to 2001.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'd like to ask you, what do these three people have in common? Well, you probably recognize the first person. I'm sure you're all avid "American Idol" watchers. But you might not recognize Aydah Al Jahani, who is a contestant, indeed a finalist, in the Poet of the Millions competition, which is broadcast out of Abu Dhabi, and seen throughout the Arab world. In this contest people have to write and recite original poetry, in the Nabati form of poetry, which is the traditional Bedouin form. And Lima Sahar was a finalist in the Afghan Star singing competition. Now, before I go any further, yes, I know it all began with "Britain's Got Talent." But my point in discussing this is to show you — I hope I'll be able to show you how these merit-based competitions, with equal access to everyone, with the winner selected via voting by SMS, are changing tribal societies. And I'm going to focus on Afghanistan and the Arab world with the UAE, how they're changing tribal societies, not by introducing Western ideas, but by being integrated into the language in those places. It all begins with enjoyment. Video: We are late to watch "Afghan Star." We are going to watch "Afghan Star." We are late. We are running late. We must go to watch "Afghan Star." Cynthia Schneider: These programs are reaching incredibly deeply into society. In Afghanistan, people go to extraordinary lengths to be able to watch this program. And you don't necessarily have to have your own TV set. People watch it all over the country also in public places. But it goes beyond watching, because also, part of this is campaigning. People become so engaged that they have volunteers, just like political volunteers anyway, who fan out over the countryside, campaigning for their candidate. Contestants also put themselves forward. Now, of course there is a certain degree of ethnic allegiance, but not entirely. Because each year the winner has come from a different tribal group. This has opened up the door, particularly for women. And in the last season there were two women in the finalists. One of them, Lima Sahar, is a Pashtun from Kandahar, a very conservative part of the country. And here she relates, in the documentary film "Afghan Star," how her friends urged her not to do this and told her that she was leaving them for democracy. But she also confides that she knows that members of the Taliban are actually SMS-ing votes in for her. Aydah Al Jahnani also took risks and put herself out, to compete in the Poet of the Millions competition. I have to say, her husband backed her from the start. But her tribe and family urged her not to compete and were very much against it. But, once she started to win, then they got behind her again. It turns out that competition and winning is a universal human value. And she's out there. Her poetry is about women, and the life of women in society. So just by presenting herself and being in competition with men — this shows the voting on the program — it sets a very important example for young women — these are young women in the audience of the program — in Abu Dhabi, but also people in the viewing audience. Now you'd think that "American Idol" would introduce a measure of Americanization. But actually, just the opposite is happening. By using this engaging popular format for traditional, local culture, it actually, in the Gulf, is precipitating a revival of interest in Nabati poetry, also in traditional dress and dance and music. And for Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned music for many years, it is reintroducing their traditional music. They don't sing pop songs, they sing Afghan music. And they also have learned how to lose gracefully, without avenging the winner. (Laughter) No small thing. And the final, sort of, formulation of this "American Idol" format, which has just appeared in Afghanistan, is a new program called "The Candidate." And in this program, people present policy platforms that are then voted on. Many of them are too young to run for president, but by putting the issues out there, they are influencing the presidential race. So for me, the substance of things unseen is how reality TV is driving reality. Thank you. (Applause)

The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology

{0: 'As an MIT grad student, Pranav Mistry invented SixthSense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.'}

TEDIndia 2009

We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. There are an enormous number of them that we use every day. Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. A gesture of "Namaste!", maybe, to respect someone, or maybe, in India I don't need to teach a kid that this means "four runs" in cricket. It comes as a part of our everyday learning. So, I am very interested, from the beginning, how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures, and how we use these objects, can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world. Rather than using a keyboard and mouse, why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world? So, I started this exploration around eight years back, and it literally started with a mouse on my desk. Rather than using it for my computer, I actually opened it. Most of you might be aware that, in those days, the mouse used to come with a ball inside, and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving, and, accordingly, where the mouse is moving. So, I was interested in these two rollers, and I actually wanted more, so I borrowed another mouse from a friend — never returned to him — and I now had four rollers. Interestingly, what I did with these rollers is, basically, I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line. It had some strings and pulleys and some springs. What I got is basically a gesture-interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars. So, here, whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made, around eight years back, in 2000. Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds, I thought of sticky notes. I thought, "Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world?" A message written on a sticky note to my mom, on paper, can come to an SMS, or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar — a to-do list that automatically syncs with you. But you can also search in the digital world, or maybe you can write a query, saying, "What is Dr. Smith's address?" and this small system actually prints it out — so it actually acts like a paper input-output system, just made out of paper. In another exploration, I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions. So, I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions, but they can actually draw, so that it's more intuitive to use that way. Then I thought, "Why not make a Google Map, but in the physical world?" Rather than typing a keyword to find something, I put my objects on top of it. If I put a boarding pass, it will show me where the flight gate is. A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee, or where you can trash the cup. So, these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly. Among all these experiments, there was one thing in common: I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world. I was taking some part of the objects, or any of the intuitiveness of real life, and bringing them to the digital world, because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive. But then I realized that we humans are not actually interested in computing. What we are interested in is information. We want to know about things. We want to know about dynamic things going around. So I thought, around last year — in the beginning of the last year — I started thinking, "Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way?" Maybe, "How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information?" Because pixels are actually, right now, confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets. Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects, everyday life so that I don't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels? So, in order to realize this dream, I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head. I think that's why this is called a head-mounted projector, isn't it? I took it very literally, and took my bike helmet, put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely. So now, what I can do — I can augment the world around me with this digital information. But later, I realized that I actually wanted to interact with those digital pixels, also. So I put a small camera over there that acts as a digital eye. Later, we moved to a much better, consumer-oriented pendant version of that, that many of you now know as the SixthSense device. But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go. You can start using any surface, any wall around you, as an interface. The camera is actually tracking all your gestures. Whatever you're doing with your hands, it's understanding that gesture. And, actually, if you see, there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it. You can start painting on any wall. You stop by a wall, and start painting on that wall. But we are not only tracking one finger, here. We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands, so you can actually use both of your hands to zoom into or zoom out of a map just by pinching all present. The camera is actually doing — just, getting all the images — is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside. So, technically, it's a little bit complex, but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use, in some sense. But I'm more excited that you can actually take it outside. Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket, you can just do the gesture of taking a photo, and it takes a photo for you. (Applause) Thank you. And later I can find a wall, anywhere, and start browsing those photos or maybe, "OK, I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend." So, we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world. And, of course, if you don't have any surface, you can start using your palm for simple operations. Here, I'm dialing a phone number just using my hand. The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements, but, interestingly, is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand. For example, in this case, the book cover is matched with so many thousands, or maybe millions of books online, and checking out which book it is. Once it has that information, it finds out more reviews about that, or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that, so you can actually hear, on a physical book, a review as sound. (Video) Famous talk at Harvard University — This was Obama's visit last week to MIT. (Video) And particularly I want to thank two outstanding MIT — Pranav Mistry: So, I was seeing the live [video] of his talk, outside, on just a newspaper. Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated. You have to check your computer in order to do that, right? (Applause) When I'm going back, I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed, because at that particular time, I'm not feeling like opening my iPhone, and checking out a particular icon. And I think this technology will not only change the way — (Laughter) Yes. It will change the way we interact with people, also, not only the physical world. The fun part is, I'm going to the Boston metro, and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground, right? (Laughter) And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life. But many of you argue, actually, that all of our work is not only about physical objects. We actually do lots of accounting and paper editing and all those kinds of things; what about that? And many of you are excited about the next-generation tablet computers to come out in the market. So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. So, what I did here is remove the camera — All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that — like I just made a clip out of the microphone — and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I'm touching the paper. But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving. You can of course watch movies. (Video) Good afternoon. My name is Russell, and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54." PM: And you can of course play games. (Car engine) Here, the camera is actually understanding how you're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game. (Applause) Many of you already must have thought, OK, you can browse. Yeah. Of course you can browse to any websites or you can do all sorts of computing on a piece of paper wherever you need it. So, more interestingly, I'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way. When I come back to my desk, I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer. (Applause) And why only computers? We can just play with papers. Paper world is interesting to play with. Here, I'm taking a part of a document, and putting over here a second part from a second place, and I'm actually modifying the information that I have over there. Yeah. And I say, "OK, this looks nice, let me print it out, that thing." So I now have a print-out of that thing. So the workflow is more intuitive, the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back, rather than now switching between these two worlds. So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines. That's all. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, Pranav, first of all, you're a genius. This is incredible, really. What are you doing with this? Is there a company being planned? Or is this research forever, or what? Pranav Mistry: So, there are lots of companies, sponsor companies of Media Lab interested in taking this ahead in one or another way. Companies like mobile-phone operators want to take this in a different way than the NGOs in India, thinking, "Why can we only have 'Sixth Sense'? We should have a 'Fifth Sense' for missing-sense people who cannot speak. This technology can be used for them to speak out in a different way maybe a speaker system." CA: What are your own plans? Are you staying at MIT, or are you going to do something with this? PM: I'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device, because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own. We will provide all the open source software for them, maybe starting next month. CA: Open source? Wow. (Applause) CA: Are you going to come back to India with some of this, at some point? PM: Yeah. Yes, yes, of course. CA: What are your plans? MIT? India? How are you going to split your time going forward? PM: There is a lot of energy here. Lots of learning. All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India. And now, if you see, it's more about the cost-effectiveness: this system costs you $300 compared to the $20,000 surface tables, or anything like that. Or maybe even the $2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $5,000? I showed that, at a conference, to President Abdul Kalam, at that time, and then he said, "OK, we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that." So I'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment. (Applause) CA: Based on the people we've seen at TED, I would say you're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now. It's an honor to have you at TED. Thank you so much. That's fantastic. (Applause)

Science-inspired design

{0: 'Kitchen-sized fish farms, living air purifiers and devices that turn old water bottles into martini shakers all spring from the form-and-function-fusing mind of designer Mathieu Lehanneur.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

One morning, in the year 1957, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield saw himself like this, a weird freak with huge hands, huge mouth, and a tiny bottom. Actually this creature is the result of the Penfield research. He named it homunculus. Basically the homunculus is the visualization of a human being where each part of the body is proportional to the surface it takes in the brain. So, of course, homunculus is definitely not a freak. It's you. It's me. It's our invisible reality. This visualization could explain, for example, why newborns, or smokers, put, instinctively, their fingers in the mouth. Unfortunately it doesn't explain why so many designers remain mainly interested in designing chairs. So anyway, even if I do not understand science entirely, for my design I essentially refer to it. I'm fascinated by its ability to deeply investigate the human being, its way of working, its way of feeling. And it really helps me to understand how we see, how we hear, how we breathe, how our brain can inform or mislead us. It's a great tool for me to understand what could be our real needs. Marketing people have never been able to do that. Marketing reduces things. Marketing simplifies. Marketing creates user groups. And scientists, amidst complexity, amidst fluctuation and uniqueness. What could be our real needs? Maybe the silence. In our daily life we are continuously disturbed by aggressive sounds. And you know all those kind of sound puts us in a kind of stressful state, and prevent us from being quiet and focused. So I wanted to create a kind of sound filter, able to preserve ourselves from noise pollution. But I didn't want it to make it by isolating people, without any earmuffs or those kind of things. Or neither with including complex technology. I just wanted to, using the complexity and the technology of the brain, of the human brain. So I worked with white noise. dB is basically — dB is the name of the product, basically a white noise diffuser. This is white noise. The white noise is the sum of all frequencies that are audible by the human being, brought to the same intensity. And this noise is like a "shhhhhhhhhhhhh," like that. And this noise is the most neutral. It is the perfect sound for our ears and our brain. So when you hear this sound you feel like a kind of shelter, preserved from noise pollution. And when you hear the white noise, your brain is immediately focused on it. And do not be disturbed any more by the other aggressive sound. It seems to be magic. But it is just physiology. It's just in your brain. And in mine, I hope. So in order to make this white noise a little bit active and reactive, I create a ball, a rolling ball able to analyze and find where does aggressive sound come from, and roll, at home or at work, towards aggressive noise, and emits white noise in order to neutralize it. (Laughter) It works. You feel the effect of the white noise? It's too in silence. If you make some noise you can feel the effect. So even if this object, even if this product includes some technology, it includes some speakers, it includes some microphones and some electronic devices, this object is not a very smart object. And I don't want to make a very smart object. I don't want to create a perfect object like a perfect robot. I want to create an object like you and me. So, definitely not perfect. So imagine, for instance, you are at home. A loving dispute with your girl or boyfriend. You shout. You say, "Blah blah blah, Blah blah blah. Who is this guy?" And dB will probably roll toward you. And turning around you is "shhhhhhh," like that. (Laughter) Definitely not perfect. So you would probably shut it, at this point. (Laughter) Anyway, in this same kind of approach, I designed K. K is a daylight receiver transmitter. So this object is supposed to be displayed on your desk, or on your piano, where you are supposed to spend most of your time in the day. And this object will be able to know exactly the quantity of light you receive during the day, and able to give you the quantity of light you need. This object is completely covered by fiber opticals. And the idea of those fiber opticals is to inform the object, for sure, but creates the idea of an eye sensibility of the object. I want, by this design feel, when you see it, you see, instinctively, this object seems to be very sensitive, very reactive. And this object knows, better than you and probably before you, what you really need. You have to know that the lack of daylight can provoke some problem of energy, or problem of libido. So, a huge problem. (Laughter) Most of the projects I work on — I live in collaboration with scientists. I'm just a designer. So I need them. So there can be some biologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on. And I submit them, my intuitions, my hypothesis, my first ideas. And they react. They told me what is possible, what is impossible. And together we improve the original concept. And we build the project to the end. And this kind of relationship between designer and scientist started when I was at school. Indeed in my studies I was a guinea pig for a pharmaceutical industry. And the irony for me was of course, I didn't do that for the sake of science progress. I just do that to make money. Anyway, this project, or this experience, make me start a new project on the design of medicine. You have to know that today, roughly one or two every drug pills is not taken correctly. So even if the active constituents in pharmaceuticals made constant progress in terms of chemistry, target of stability, the behavior of the patients goes more and more unstable. So we took too many of them. We took irregular dosage. We do not follow instructions. And so on. So I wanted to create a new kind of medicine, in order to create a new kind of relationship between the patient and the treatment. So I turned traditional pills into this. I'm going to give you some example. This one is an antibiotic. And its purpose is to help patient to go to the end of the treatment. And the concept is to create a kind of onion, a kind of structure in layers. So, you start with the darkest one. And you are helped to visualize the duration of the treatment. And you are helped to visualize the decrease of the infection. So the first day, this is the big one. And you have to peel and eat one layer a day. And your antibiotic goes smaller and clearer. And you're waiting for recovery as you were waiting for the Christmas day. And you follow the treatment like that, to the end of the treatment. And here you can get the white core. And it means, right, you are in the recovery. (Applause) Thank you. This one is a "third lung," a pharmaceutical device for long-term asthma treatment. I designed it to help kids to follow the treatment. So the idea of this one is to create a relationship between the patient of the treatment but a relationship of dependency. But in this case it is not the medication that is dependent on the patient. This is, the kids will feel the therapeutic object needs him. So the idea is, all night long the elastic skin of the third lung will slowly inflate itself, including air and molecules, for sure. And when the kids wake up, he can see the object needs him. And he take him to his mouth, and breathe the air it contains. So by this way, the kid, to take care of himself, is to take care of this living object. And he does not feel anymore it's relies on asthma treatment, as the asthma treatment needs him. (Applause) In this guise of living object approach, I like the idea of a kind of invisible design, as if the function of the object exists in a kind of invisible field just around the objects themselves. We could talk about a kind of soul, of a ghost accompanying them. And almost a kind of poltergeist effect. So when a passive object like this one seems to be alive, because it is — woosh — starting to move. And I remember an exhibition design I made for John Maeda, and for the Fondation Cartier in Paris. And John Maeda was supposed to show several graphic animations in this exhibition. And my idea for this exhibition design was to create a real pong game, like this one. And the idea was to create some self-moving benches in the main exhibition room. So the living benches would be exactly like the ball. And John was so excited by this idea. He said to me, "Okay let's go." I remember the day of the opening. I was a little bit late. When I bring the 10 living and self-moving benches in the exhibition room, John was just beside me, and was like, "Hmm. Hmm." And he told me, after a long silence, "I wonder, Mathieu, if people won't be more fascinated by your benches than by my videos." (Laughter) It would be a great honor, a great compliment for me, if he hadn't decided to take all them off two hours before the opening. So, huge tragedy. I guess you won't be surprised if I tell you that Pinocchio is one of my great influences. Pinocchio is probably one of my best design products, my favorite one. Because it is a kind of object with a conscience, able to be modified by its surroundings, and able to modify it as well. The other great influence is the mine's canary. In coal mines, this canary was supposed to be close to the miners. And it was singing all day long. And when it stops it means that it just died. So this canary was a living alarm, and a very efficient one. A very natural technology, in order to say to the miners, "The air is too bad. You have to go. It's an emergency." So it's, for me, a great product. And I tried to design a kind of canary. Andrea is one. Andrea is a living air filter that absorbs toxic gasses from air, contaminated indoor air. So it uses some plants to do this job, selected for their gas-filtering ability. You have to know, or you probably already know, that indoor air pollution is more toxic than outdoor one. So while I'm talking to you, the seats you are sitting on are currently emitting some invisible and odorless toxic gas. Sorry for that. (Laughter) So you are currently breathing formaldehyde. It's the same for me with the carpet. And this is exactly the same at home. Because all the product we get constantly give away the volatile component of which they're made of. So let's have a look at your home. So your sofa, your plastic chair, your kid's toys give their own invisible reality. And this one is very toxic. This is the reason why I created, with David Edward, a scientist of Harvard University, an object able to absorb the toxic elements using those kind of plants. But the idea is to force the air to go in the effective part of the plants. Because the roots of the plant are not very effective. Bill Wolverton from NASA analyzed it cleverly in the '70s. So the idea is to create an object able to force the air, and to be in contact at the right speed at the right place, in all the effective parts of the plant. So this is the final object. It will be launched next September. (Applause) This one is kind of the same approach because I include, in a product like Andrea, some plants. And in this one, plants are used for the water filtration ability. And it includes some fishes as well. But here, unlike Andrea, here are supposed to be eaten. Indeed, this object is a domestic farm, for fishes and green. So the idea of this object is to be able to get at home very local food. The locavores used to get food taken in a radius of 100 miles. Local River is able to provide you food directly in your living room. So the principle of this object is to create an ecosystem called aquaponics. And the aquaponics is the dirty water of the fish, by a water pump, feeds the plants above. And the plants will filter, by the roots, the dirty water of the fish. After, it goes back into the fish tank. After that you have two options. Or you sit down in front of it like you would do in front your TV set. Amazing channel. Or you start fishing. And you make some sushis with a fish and the aromatic plants above. Because you can grow some potatoes. No, not potatoes, but tomatoes, aromatic plants and so on. So now we can breathe safely. Now we can eat local food. Now we can be treated by smart medicine. Now we can be well-balanced in our biorhythm with daylight. But it was important to create a perfect place, so I tried to, in order to work and create. So I designed, for an American scientist based in Paris, a very stimulative, brain-stimulative office. I wanted to create a perfect place where you can work and play, and where your body and your brain can work together. So, in this office, you do not work anymore at your desk, like a politician. Your seat, your sleep and your play on a big geodesic island made of leather. See, like this one? In this office you do not work and write and draw on a sheet of paper, but you draw directly on a kind of huge whiteboard cave, like a prehistoric scientist. So you, like that, can make some sport during your work. In this office you do not need to go out in order to be in contact with nature. You include, directly, the nature in the floor of the office. You can see it there. This is an inspiration image to lead this project of the office. It really helped me to design it. I never show it to my client. He would be so afraid. (Laughter) Just for my workshop. I guess it may be the revenge of the guinea pig I was. But it's maybe the conviction as monkey and homunculus we are. All of us need to be considered according to our real nature. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Learning from leadership's missing manual

{0: 'Fields Wicker-Miurin wants to improve the quality and impact of leadership worldwide by discovering leaders in unique, local settings and connecting them with one another.'}

TEDSalon London 2009

I'm going to talk about some of my discoveries around the world through my work. These are not discoveries of planets or new technologies or science. They're discoveries of people and the way people are, and new leadership. This is Benki. Benki is a leader of the Ashaninka Nation. His people live in Brazil and in Peru. Benki comes from a village so remote up in the Amazon that to get there, either you have to fly and land on water, or go by canoe for several days. I met Benki three years ago in Sao Paulo when I'd brought him and other leaders from indigenous peoples to meet with me and leaders from around the world, because we wanted to learn from each other. We wanted to share our stories with each other. The Ashaninka people are known throughout South America for their dignity, their spirit and their resistance, starting with the Incas and continuing through the 19th century with the rubber tappers. Today's biggest threat to the Ashaninka people and to Benki comes from illegal logging — the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees, float them down the river to world markets. Benki knew this. He could see what was happening to his forest, to his environment, because he was taken under his grandfather's wing when he was only two years old to begin to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people. His grandfather died when he was only 10. And at that young age, 10 years old, Benki became the paje of his community. Now, in the Ashaninka tradition and culture, the paje is the most important person in the community. This is the person who contains within him all the knowledge, all the wisdom of centuries and centuries of life, and not just about his people, but about everything that his people's survival depended on: the trees, the birds, the water, the soil, the forest. So when he was only 10 and he became the paje, he began to lead his people. He began to talk to them about the forest that they needed to protect, the way of life they needed to nurture. He explained to them that it was not a question of survival of the fittest; it was a question of understanding what they needed to survive and to protect that. Eight years later, when he was a young man of 18, Benki left the forest for the first time. He went 3,000 miles on an odyssey to Rio to the Earth Summit to tell the world what was happening in his tiny, little corner. And he went because he hoped the world would listen. Some did, not everybody. But if you can imagine this young man with his headdress and his flowing robe, learning a new language, Portuguese, not to mention English, going to Rio, building a bridge to reach out to people he'd never met before — a pretty hostile world. But he wasn't dismayed. Benki came back to his village full of ideas — new technologies, new research, new ways of understanding what was going on. Since that time, he's continued to work with his people, and not only the Ashaninka Nation, but all the peoples of the Amazon and beyond. He's built schools to teach children to care for the forest. Together, he's led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers. He's created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods. And he's brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest — both so that people themselves could monitor the deforestation, but also that he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world. If you were to meet Benki and ask him, "Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself at risk? Why are you making yourself vulnerable to what is often a hostile world?" he would tell you, as he told me, "I asked myself," he said, "What did my grandparents and my great-grandparents do to protect the forest for me? And what am I doing?" So when I think of that, I wonder what our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, when they ask themselves that question, I wonder how they will answer. For me, the world is veering towards a future we don't much want when we really think about it deep inside. It's a future we don't know the details of, but it's a future that has signs, just like Benki saw the signs around him. We know we are running out of what we need. We're running out of fresh water. We're running out of fossil fuels. We're running out of land. We know climate change is going to affect all of us. We don't know how, but we know it will. And we know that there will be more of us than ever before — five times as many people in 40 years than 60 years ago. We are running out of what we need. And we also know that the world has changed in other ways, that since 1960 there are one-third as many new countries that exist as independent entities on the planet. Egos, systems of government — figuring it out — massive change. And in addition to that, we know that five other really big countries are going to have a say in the future, a say we haven't even really started to hear yet — China, India, Russia, South Africa and Benki's own Brazil, where Benki got his civil rights only in the 1988 constitution. But you know all that. You know more than Benki knew when he left his forest and went 3,000 miles. You also know that we can't just keep doing what we've always done, because we'll get the results we've always gotten. And this reminds me of something I understand Lord Salisbury said to Queen Victoria over a hundred years ago, when she was pressing him, "Please change." He said, "Change? Why change? Things are bad enough as they are." We have to change. It's imperative to me, when I look around the world, that we need to change ourselves. We need new models of what it means to be a leader. We need new models of being a leader and a human in the world. I started life as a banker. Now I don't admit to that to anybody but my very close friends. But for the past eight years, I've done something completely different. My work has taken me around the world, where I've had the real privilege of meeting people like Benki and many others who are making change happen in their communities — people who see the world differently, who are asking different questions, who have different answers, who understand the filters that they wear when they go out into the world. This is Sanghamitra. Sanghamitra comes from Bangalore. I met Sanghamitra eight years ago when I was in Bangalore organizing a workshop with leaders of different NGO's working in some of the hardest aspects of society. Sanghamitra didn't start life as a leader of an NGO, she started her career as university professor, teaching English literature. But she realized that she was much too detached from the world doing that. She loved it, but she was too detached. And so in 1993, a long time ago, she decided to start a new organization called Samraksha focused on one of the hardest areas, one of the hardest issues in India — anywhere in the world at the time — HIV/AIDS. Since that time, Samraksha has grown from strength to strength and is now one of the leading health NGO's in India. But if you just think about the state of the world and knowledge of HIV/AIDS in 1993 — in India at that time it was skyrocketing and nobody understood why, and everyone was actually very, very afraid. Today there are still three million HIV-positive people in India. That's the second largest population in the world. When I asked Sanghamitra, "How did you get from English literature to HIV/AIDS?" not an obvious path, she said to me, "It's all connected. Literature makes one sensitive, sensitive to people, to their dreams and to their ideas." Since that time, under her leadership, Samraksha has been a pioneer in all fields related to HIV/AIDS. They have respite homes, the first, the first care centers, the first counseling services — and not just in urban, 7-million-population Bangalore, but in the hardest to reach villages in the state of Karnataka. Even that wasn't enough. She wanted to change policy at the government level. 10 of their programs that she pioneered are now government policy and funded by the government. They take care of 20,000-odd people today in over 1,000 villages around Karnataka. She works with people like Murali Krishna. Murali Krishna comes from one of those villages. He lost his wife to AIDS a couple of years ago, and he's HIV-positive. But he saw the work, the care, the compassion that Sanghamitra and her team brought to the village, and he wanted to be part of it. He's a Leaders' Quest fellow, and that helps him with his work. They've pioneered a different approach to villages. Instead of handing out information in pamphlets, as is so often the case, they bring theater troupes, songs, music, dance. And they sit around, and they talk about dreams. Sanghamitra told me just last week — she had just come back from two weeks in the villages, and she had a real breakthrough. They were sitting in a circle, talking about the dreams for the village. And the young women in the village spoke up and said, "We've changed our dream. Our dream is for our partners, our husbands, not to be given to us because of a horoscope, but to be given to us because they've been tested for HIV." If you are lucky enough to meet Sanghamitra and ask her why and how, how have you achieved so much? She would look at you and very quietly, very softly say, "It just happened. It's the spirit inside." This is Dr. Fan Jianchuan. Jianchuan comes from Sichuan Province in southwest China. He was born in 1957, and you can imagine what his childhood looked like and felt like, and what his life has been like over the last 50 tumultuous years. He's been a soldier, a teacher, a politician, a vice-mayor and a business man. But if you sat down and asked him, "Who are you really, and what do you do?" He would tell you, "I'm a collector, and I curate a museum." I was lucky; I had heard about him for years, and I finally met him earlier this year at his museum in Chengdu. He's been a collector all of his life, starting when he was four or five in the early 1960's. Now, just think of the early 1960's in China. Over a lifetime, through everything, through the Cultural Revolution and everything afterward, he's kept collecting, so that he now has over eight million pieces in his museums documenting contemporary Chinese history. These are pieces that you won't find anywhere else in the world, in part because they document parts of history Chinese choose to forget. For example, he's got over one million pieces documenting the Sino-Japanese War, a war that's not talked about in China very much and whose heroes are not honored. Why did he do all this? Because he thought a nation should never repeat the mistakes of the past. So, from commissioning slightly larger than life bronze statues of the heroes of the Sino-Japanese War, including those Chinese who then fought with each other and left mainland China to go to Taiwan, to commemorating all the unknown, ordinary soldiers who survived, by asking them to take prints of their hands, he is making sure — one man is making sure — that history is not forgotten. But it's not just Chinese heroes he cares about. This building contains the world's largest collection of documents and artifacts commemorating the U.S. role in fighting on the Chinese side in that long war — the Flying Tigers. He has nine other buildings — that are already open to the public — filled to the rafters with artifacts documenting contemporary Chinese history. Two of the most sensitive buildings include a lifetime of collection about the Cultural Revolution, a period that actually most Chinese would prefer to forget. But he doesn't want his nation ever to forget. These people inspire me, and they inspire me because they show us what is possible when you change the way you look at the world, change the way you look at your place in the world. They looked outside, and then they changed what was on the inside. They didn't go to business school. They didn't read a manual, "How to Be a Good Leader in 10 Easy Steps." But they have qualities we'd all recognize. They have drive, passion, commitment. They've gone away from what they did before, and they've gone to something they didn't know. They've tried to connect worlds they didn't know existed before. They've built bridges, and they've walked across them. They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it. They know people have come before them and will follow them. And they know that they're part of a whole, that they depend on other people. It's not about them, they know that, but it has to start with them. And they have humility. It just happens. But we know it doesn't just happen, don't we? We know it takes a lot to make it happen, and we know the direction the world is going in. So I think we need succession planning on a global basis. We can't wait for the next generation, the new joiners, to come in and learn how to be the good leaders we need. I think it has to start with us. And we know, just like they knew, how hard it is. But the good news is that we don't have to figure it out as we go along; we have models, we have examples, like Benki and Sanghamitra and Jianchuan. We can look at what they've done, if we look. We can learn from what they've learned. We can change the way we see ourselves in the world. And if we're lucky, we can change the way our great-grandchildren will answer Benki's question. Thank you. (Applause)

East vs. West -- the myths that mystify

{0: 'Devdutt Pattanaik looks at business and modern life through the lens of mythology.'}

TEDIndia 2009

To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do, you have to hear a story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers, and his brother, the athletic warlord of the gods, Kartikeya. The two brothers one day decided to go on a race, three times around the world. Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans. He went around once, he went around twice, he went around thrice. But his brother, Ganesha, simply walked around his parents once, twice, thrice, and said, "I won." "How come?" said Kartikeya. And Ganesha said, "You went around 'the world.' I went around 'my world.'" What matters more? If you understand the difference between 'the world' and 'my world,' you understand the difference between logos and mythos. 'The world' is objective, logical, universal, factual, scientific. 'My world' is subjective. It's emotional. It's personal. It's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, dreams. It is the belief system that we carry. It's the myth that we live in. 'The world' tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. 'My world' tells us why the sun rises, why we were born. Every culture is trying to understand itself: "Why do we exist?" And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life, its own customized version of mythology. Culture is a reaction to nature, and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals, which are always indifferent to rationality. And so, when you study it, you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world. Different people see things differently — different viewpoints. There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition. Yours is faith. Yours is illogical. This is the root of the clash of civilizations. It took place, once, in 326 B.C. on the banks of a river called the Indus, now in Pakistan. This river lends itself to India's name. India. Indus. Alexander, a young Macedonian, met there what he called a "gymnosophist," which means "the naked, wise man." We don't know who he was. Perhaps he was a Jain monk, like Bahubali over here, the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore. Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock, staring at the sky and the sun and the moon. Alexander asked, "What are you doing?" and the gymnosophist answered, "I'm experiencing nothingness." Then the gymnosophist asked, "What are you doing?" and Alexander said, "I am conquering the world." And they both laughed. Each one thought that the other was a fool. The gymnosophist said, "Why is he conquering the world? It's pointless." And Alexander thought, "Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? What a waste of a life." To understand this difference in viewpoints, we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander — his myth, and the mythology that constructed it. Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's "Iliad." They told him of a great hero called Achilles, who, when he participated in battle, victory was assured, but when he withdrew from the battle, defeat was inevitable. "Achilles was a man who could shape history, a man of destiny, and this is what you should be, Alexander." That's what he heard. "What should you not be? You should not be Sisyphus, who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night. Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless. Be spectacular! — like the Greek heroes, like Jason, who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece. Be spectacular like Theseus, who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur. When you play in a race, win! — because when you win, the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods." Because, you see, the Greeks believed you live only once, and when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. And if you have lived an extraordinary life, you will be welcomed to Elysium, or what the French call "Champs-Élysées" — (Laughter) — the heaven of the heroes. But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard. He heard a very different story. He heard of a man called Bharat, after whom India is called Bhārata. Bharat also conquered the world. And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru. And he wanted to hoist his flag to say, "I was here first." But when he reached the mountain peak, he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him, each one claiming "'I was here first' ... that's what I thought until I came here." And suddenly, in this canvas of infinity, Bharat felt insignificant. This was the mythology of the gymnosophist. You see, he had heroes, like Ram — Raghupati Ram and Krishna, Govinda Hari. But they were not two characters on two different adventures. They were two lifetimes of the same hero. When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins. When Ram dies, Krishna is born. When Krishna dies, eventually he will be back as Ram. You see, the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. But you don't cross it once. You go to and fro endlessly. It was called the Vaitarani. You go again and again and again. Because, you see, nothing lasts forever in India, not even death. And so, you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days ... And what do you do at the end of 10 days? You dunk it in the river. Because it has to end. And next year, she will come back. What goes around always comes around, and this rule applies not just to man, but also the gods. You see, the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram, as Krishna. Not only do they live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all. "Groundhog Day." (Laughter) Two different mythologies. Which is right? Two different mythologies, two different ways of looking at the world. One linear, one cyclical. One believes this is the one and only life. The other believes this is one of many lives. And so, the denominator of Alexander's life was one. So, the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements. The denominator of the gymnosophist's life was infinity. So, no matter what he did, it was always zero. And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero. Who knows? And that brings us to the mythology of business. If Alexander's belief influenced his behavior, if the gymnosophist's belief influences his behavior, then it was bound to influence the business they were in. You see, what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves? And if you look at cultures around the world, all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business. Take a look. If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with everything is relative, sort of — (Laughter) mostly. (Laughter) You look at art. Look at the ballerina, how linear she is in her performance. And then look at the Indian classical dancer, the Kuchipudi dancer, the Bharatanatyam dancer, curvaceous. (Laughter) And then look at business. Standard business model: vision, mission, values, processes. Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, with the commandments held by the leader. And if you comply, you will go to heaven. But in India there is no "the" promised land. There are many promised lands, depending on your station in society, depending on your stage of life. You see, businesses are not run as institutions, by the idiosyncrasies of individuals. It's always about taste. It's always about my taste. You see, Indian music, for example, does not have the concept of harmony. There is no orchestra conductor. There is one performer standing there, and everybody follows. And you can never replicate that performance twice. It is not about documentation and contract. It's about conversation and faith. It's not about compliance. It's about setting, getting the job done, by bending or breaking the rules — just look at your Indian people around here, you'll see them smile; they know what it is. (Laughter) And then look at people who have done business in India, you'll see the exasperation on their faces. (Laughter) (Applause) You see, this is what India is today. The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view. So, it's rapidly changing, highly diverse, chaotic, ambiguous, unpredictable. And people are okay with it. And then globalization is taking place. The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in. Which is rooted in one-life culture. And a clash is going to take place, like on the banks of the Indus. It is bound to happen. I have personally experienced it. I'm trained as a medical doctor. I did not want to study surgery. Don't ask me why. I love mythology too much. I wanted to learn mythology. But there is nowhere you can study. So, I had to teach it to myself. And mythology does not pay, well, until now. (Laughter) So, I had to take up a job. And I worked in the pharma industry. And I worked in the healthcare industry. And I worked as a marketing guy, and a sales guy, and a knowledge guy, and a content guy, and a training guy. I even was a business consultant, doing strategies and tactics. And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues, when they were dealing with India. Example: Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals. Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly. (Laughter) How do you parameterize "mostly"? How do you put it in a nice little software? You can't. I would give my viewpoints to people. But nobody was interested in listening to it, you see, until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group. You see, he has established the largest retail chain, called Big Bazaar. And there are more than 200 formats, across 50 cities and towns of India. And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets. And he knew very intuitively, that best practices, developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India. He knew that institutional thinking doesn't work in India. Individual thinking does. He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India. So, he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer, and said, "All I want to do is align belief." Sounds so simple. But belief is not measurable. You can't measure it. You can't manage it. So, how do you construct belief? How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness. Even if you are Indian, it is not very explicit, it is not very obvious. So, I tried to work on the standard model of culture, which is, develop stories, symbols and rituals. And I will share one of the rituals with you. You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan. Hindus don't have the concept of commandments. So, there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life. So, you're not really sure how you stand in front of God. So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God. You want to see God. And you want God to see you, and hence the gods have very large eyes, large unblinking eyes, sometimes made of silver, so they look at you. Because you don't know whether you're right or wrong, and so all you seek is divine empathy. "Just know where I came from, why I did the Jugaad." (Laughter) "Why did I do the setting, why I don't care for the processes. Just understand me, please." And based on this, we created a ritual for leaders. After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store, we blindfold him, we surround him with the stakeholders, the customer, his family, his team, his boss. You read out his KRA, his KPI, you give him the keys, and then you remove the blindfold. And invariably, you see a tear, because the penny has dropped. He realizes that to succeed, he does not have to be a "professional," he does not have to cut out his emotions, he has to include all these people in his world to succeed, to make them happy, to make the boss happy, to make everyone happy. The customer is happy, because the customer is God. That sensitivity is what we need. Once this belief enters, behavior will happen, business will happen. And it has. So, then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist. And everybody asks me, "Which is the better way, this way or that way?" And it's a very dangerous question, because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence. So, I will not answer the question. What I will give you is an Indian answer, the Indian head-shake. (Laughter) (Applause) Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm. You see, because both the paradigms are human constructions. They are cultural creations, not natural phenomena. And so the next time you meet someone, a stranger, one request: Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does he. Understand it. And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular. You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth. Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes. Indra, a hundred. You and I, only two. Thank you. Namaste. (Applause)

Learn to use the 13th-century astrolabe

{0: "Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk."}

TEDGlobal 2009

As technology progresses, and as it advances, many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent, make us smarter and more connected to the world. And what I'd like to argue is that that's not necessarily the case, as progress is simply a word for change, and with change you gain something, but you also lose something. And to really illustrate this point, what I'd like to do is to show you how technology has dealt with a very simple, a very common, an everyday question. And that question is this. What time is it? What time is it? If you glance at your iPhone, it's so simple to tell the time. But, I'd like to ask you, how would you tell the time if you didn't have an iPhone? How would you tell the time, say, 600 years ago? How would you do it? Well, the way you would do it is by using a device that's called an astrolabe. So, an astrolabe is relatively unknown in today's world. But, at the time, in the 13th century, it was the gadget of the day. It was the world's first popular computer. And it was a device that, in fact, is a model of the sky. So, the different parts of the astrolabe, in this particular type, the rete corresponds to the positions of the stars. The plate corresponds to a coordinate system. And the mater has some scales and puts it all together. If you were an educated child, you would know how to not only use the astrolabe, you would also know how to make an astrolabe. And we know this because the first treatise on the astrolabe, the first technical manual in the English language, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Yes, that Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1391, to his little Lewis, his 11-year-old son. And in this book, little Lewis would know the big idea. And the central idea that makes this computer work is this thing called stereographic projection. And basically, the concept is, how do you represent the three-dimensional image of the night sky that surrounds us onto a flat, portable, two-dimensional surface. The idea is actually relatively simple. Imagine that that Earth is at the center of the universe, and surrounding it is the sky projected onto a sphere. Each point on the surface of the sphere is mapped through the bottom pole, onto a flat surface, where it is then recorded. So the North Star corresponds to the center of the device. The ecliptic, which is the path of the sun, moon, and planets correspond to an offset circle. The bright stars correspond to little daggers on the rete. And the altitude corresponds to the plate system. Now, the real genius of the astrolabe is not just the projection. The real genius is that it brings together two coordinate systems so they fit perfectly. There is the position of the sun, moon and planets on the movable rete. And then there is their location on the sky as seen from a certain latitude on the back plate. Okay? So how would you use this device? Well, let me first back up for a moment. This is an astrolabe. Pretty impressive, isn't it? And so, this astrolabe is on loan from us from the Oxford School of — Museum of History. And you can see the different components. This is the mater, the scales on the back. This is the rete. Okay. Do you see that? That's the movable part of the sky. And in the back you can see a spider web pattern. And that spider web pattern corresponds to the local coordinates in the sky. This is a rule device. And on the back are some other devices, measuring tools and scales, to be able to make some calculations. Okay? You know, I've always wanted one of these. For my thesis I actually built one of these out of paper. And this one, this is a replica from a 15th-century device. And it's worth probably about three MacBook Pros. But a real one would cost about as much as my house, and the house next to it, and actually every house on the block, on both sides of the street, maybe a school thrown in, and some — you know, a church. They are just incredibly expensive. But let me show you how to work this device. So let's go to step one. First thing that you do is you select a star in the night sky, if you're telling time at night. So, tonight, if it's clear you'll be able to see the summer triangle. And there is a bright star called Deneb. So let's select Deneb. Second, is you measure the altitude of Deneb. So, step two, I hold the device up, and then I sight its altitude there so I can see it clearly now. And then I measure its altitude. So, it's about 26 degrees. You can't see it from over there. Step three is identify the star on the front of the device. Deneb is there. I can tell. Step four is I then move the rete, move the sky, so the altitude of the star corresponds to the scale on the back. Okay, so when that happens everything lines up. I have here a model of the sky that corresponds to the real sky. Okay? So, it is, in a sense, holding a model of the universe in my hands. And then finally, I take a rule, and move the rule to a date line which then tells me the time here. Right. So, that's how the device is used. (Laughter) So, I know what you're thinking: "That's a lot of work, isn't it? Isn't it a ton of work to be able to tell the time?" as you glance at your iPod to just check out the time. But there is a difference between the two, because with your iPod you can tell — or your iPhone, you can tell exactly what the time is, with precision. The way little Lewis would tell the time is by a picture of the sky. He would know where things would fit in the sky. He would not only know what time it was, he would also know where the sun would rise, and how it would move across the sky. He would know what time the sun would rise, and what time it would set. And he would know that for essentially every celestial object in the heavens. So, in computer graphics and computer user interface design, there is a term called affordances. So, affordances are the qualities of an object that allow us to perform an action with it. And what the astrolabe does is it allows us, it affords us, to connect to the night sky, to look up into the night sky and be much more — to see the visible and the invisible together. So, that's just one use. Incredible, there is probably 350, 400 uses. In fact, there is a text, and that has over a thousand uses of this first computer. On the back there is scales and measurements for terrestrial navigation. You can survey with it. The city of Baghdad was surveyed with it. It can be used for calculating mathematical equations of all different types. And it would take a full university course to illustrate it. Astrolabes have an incredible history. They are over 2,000 years old. The concept of stereographic projection originated in 330 B.C. And the astrolabes come in many different sizes and shapes and forms. There is portable ones. There is large display ones. And I think what is common to all astrolabes is that they are beautiful works of art. There is a quality of craftsmanship and precision that is just astonishing and remarkable. Astrolabes, like every technology, do evolve over time. So, the earliest retes, for example, were very simple and primitive. And advancing retes became cultural emblems. This is one from Oxford. And I find this one really extraordinary because the rete pattern is completely symmetrical, and it accurately maps a completely asymmetrical, or random sky. How cool is that? This is just amazing. So, would little Lewis have an astrolabe? Probably not one made of brass. He would have one made out of wood, or paper. And the vast majority of this first computer was a portable device that you could keep in the back of your pocket. So, what does the astrolabe inspire? Well, I think the first thing is that it reminds us just how resourceful people were, our forebears were, years and years ago. It's just an incredible device. Every technology advances. Every technology is transformed and moved by others. And what we gain with a new technology, of course, is precision and accuracy. But what we lose, I think, is an accurate — a felt sense of the sky, a sense of context. Knowing the sky, knowing your relationship with the sky, is the center of the real answer to knowing what time it is. So, it's — I think astrolabes are just remarkable devices. And so, what can you learn from these devices? Well, primarily that there is a subtle knowledge that we can connect with the world. And astrolabes return us to this subtle sense of how things all fit together, and also how we connect to the world. Thanks very much. (Applause)

Asia's rise -- how and when

{0: 'In Hans Rosling’s hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.'}

TEDIndia 2009

Once upon a time, at the age of 24, I was a student at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. And that changed my mindset forever. The course was good, but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset. It was the brutal realization, the first morning, that the Indian students were better than me. (Laughter) You see, I was a study nerd. I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times. In Sweden we read it once and then we went partying. (Laugher) And that, to me, that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed. And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever. And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience. It's that realization of someone you meet that really made you change your ideas about the world. It's not the statistics, although I tried to make it funny. And I will now, here, onstage, try to predict when that will happen — that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world, as it used to be, over thousands of years. And I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India, in China, will reach that of the West. And I don't mean the whole economy, because to grow an economy of India to the size of U.K. — that's a piece of cake, with one billion people. But I want to see when will the average pay, the money for each person, per month, in India and China, when will that have reached that of U.K. and the United States? But I will start with a historical background. And you can see my map if I get it up here. You know? I will start at 1858. 1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to "Twitter" transatlantically. (Laughter) (Applause) And I've been able, through this wonderful Google and Internet, to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria. And it ends like this: "This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world." Those are nice words. But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty, and liberty for whom. And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858. Because 1858 was also watershed year in the history of Asia. 1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces. And India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination. 1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces. And that meant that foreigners, as it said in the treaty, were allowed to trade freely in China. It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods. And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable condition for the U.S. And they were threatened by those black ships there, that had been in Tokyo harbor over the last year. But, Japan, in contrast to India and China, maintained its national sovereignty. And let's see how much difference that can make. And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here, where you can see each bubble is a country. The size of the bubble here is the population. On this axis, as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar. And on that axis I have life expectancy, the health of people. And I also bring an innovation here. I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological, recyclable version here, in green India. (Applause) And we will see, you know. Look here, 1858, India was here, China was here, Japan was there, United States and United Kingdom was richer over there. And I will start the world like this. India was not always like this level. Actually if we go back into the historical record, there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe. But 1850 had already been many, many years of foreign domination, and India had been de-industrialized. And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom. And they were also, by the end of the century, getting healthy, and Japan was starting to catch up. India was trying down here. Can you see how it starts to move there? But really, really natural sovereignty was good for Japan. And Japan is trying to move up there. And it's the new century now. Health is getting better, United Kingdom, United States. But careful now — we are approaching the First World War. And the First World War, you know, we'll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here. United Kingdom is going down. And now comes the Spanish flu also. And then after the First World War, they continue up. Still under foreign domination, and without sovereignty, India and China are down in the corner. Not much has happened. They have grown their population but not much more. In the 1930's now, you can see that Japan is going to a period of war, with lower life expectancy. And the Second World War was really a terrible event, also economically for Japan. But they did recover quite fast afterwards. And we are moving into the new world. In 1947 India finally gained its independence. And they could raise the Indian flag and become a sovereign nation, but in very big difficulties down there. (Applause) In 1949 we saw the emergence of the modern China in a way which surprised the world. And what happened? What happens in the after independence? You can see that the health started to improve. Children started to go to school. Health services were provided. This is the Great Leap Forward, when China fell down. It was central planning by Mao Tse Tung. China recovered. Then they said, "Nevermore, stupid central planning." But they went up here, and India was trying to follow. And they were catching up indeed. And both countries had the better health, but still a very low economy. And we came to 1978, and Mao Tse Tung died, and a new guy turned up from the left. And it was Deng Xiaoping coming out here. And he said, "Doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice." Because catching mice is what the two cats wanted to do. And you can see the two cats being here, China and India, wanting to catch the mices over there, you know. And they decided to go not only for health and education, but also starting to grow their economy. And the market reformer was successful there. In '92 India follows with a market reform. And they go quite closely together, and you can see that the similarity with India and China, in many ways, are greater than the differences with them. And here they march on. And will they catch up? This is the big question today. There they are today. Now what does it mean that the — (Applause) the averages there — this is the average of China. If I would split China, look here, Shanghai has already catched up. Shanghai is already there. And it's healthier than the United States. But on the other hand, Guizhou, one of the poorest inland provinces of China, is there. And if I split Guizhou into urban and rural, the rural part of Guizhou goes down there. You see this enormous inequity in China, in the midst of fast economic growth. And if I would also look at India, you have another type of inequity, actually, in India. The geographical, macro-geographical difference is not so big. Uttar Pradesh, the biggest of the states here, is poorer and has a lower health than the rest of India. Kerala is flying on top there, matching United States in health, but not in economy. And here, Maharashtra, with Mumbai, is forging forward. Now in India, the big inequities are within the state, rather than between the states. And that is not a bad thing, in itself. If you have a lot inequity, macro-geographical inequities can be more difficult in the long term to deal with, than if it is in the same area where you have a growth center relatively close to where poor people are living. No, there is one more inequity. Look there, United States. (Laughter) Oh, they broke my frame. Washington, D.C. went out here. My friends at Gapminder wanted me to show this because there is a new leader in Washington who is really concerned about the health system. And I can understand him, because Washington, D.C. is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala. It's quite interesting, isn't it? (Applause) I can see a business opportunity for Kerala, helping fix the health system in the United States. (Laughter) (Applause) Now here we have the whole world. You have the legend down there. And when you see the two giant cats here, pushing forward, you see that in between them and ahead of them, is the whole emerging economies of the world, which Thomas Friedman so correctly called the "flat world." You can see that in health and education, a large part of the world population is putting forward, but in Africa, and other parts, as in rural Guizhou in China, there is still people with low health and very low economy. We have an enormous disparity in the world. But most of the world in the middle are pushing forwards very fast. Now, back to my projections. When will it catch up? I have to go back to very conventional graph. I will show income per person on this axis instead, poor down here, rich up there. And then time here, from 1858 I start the world. And we shall see what will happen with these countries. You see, China under foreign domination actually lowered their income and came down to the Indian level here. Whereas U.K. and United States is getting richer and richer. And after Second World War, United States is richer than U.K. But independence is coming here. Growth is starting, economic reform. Growth is faster, and with projection from IMF you can see where you expect them to be in 2014. Now, the question is, "When will the catch up take place?" Look at, look at the United States. Can you see the bubble? The bubbles, not my bubbles, but the financial bubbles. That's the dot com bubble. This is the Lehman Brothers doorstep there. You see it came down there. And it seems this is another rock coming down there, you know. So they doesn't seem to go this way, these countries. They seem to go in a more humble growth way, you know. And people interested in growth are turning their eyes towards Asia. I can compare to Japan. This is Japan coming up. You see, Japan did it like that. We add Japan to it. And there is no doubt that fast catch up can take place. Can you see here what Japan did? Japan did it like this, until full catch up, and then they follow with the other high-income economies. But the real projections for those ones, I would like to give it like this. Can be worse, can be better. It's always difficult to predict, especially about the future. Now, a historian tells me it's even more difficult to predict about the past. (Laughter) I think I'm in a difficult position here. Inequalities in China and India I consider really the big obstacle because to bring the entire population into growth and prosperity is what will create a domestic market, what will avoid social instability, and which will make use of the entire capacity of the population. So, social investments in health, education and infrastructure, and electricity is really what is needed in India and China. You know the climate. We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change. And I consider India and China the best partners in the world in a good global climate policy. But they ain't going to pay for what others, who have more money, have largely created, and I can agree on that. But what I'm really worried about is war. Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia? And will Asia be able to handle that new position of being in charge of being the most mighty, and the governors of the world? So, always avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward. Now if these inequalities, climate and war can be avoided, get ready for a world in equity, because this is what seems to be happening. And that vision that I got as a young student, 1972, that Indians can be much better than Swedes, is just about to happen. And it will happen precisely the year 2048 in the later part of the summer, in July, more precisely, the 27th of July. (Applause) The 27th of July, 2048 is my 100th birthday. (Laughter) And I expect to speak in the first session of the 39th TED India. Get your bookings in time. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Transition to a world without oil

{0: 'Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

As a culture, we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future, and where we might move forward from this point. Some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us. Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling. But I want to tell you a different story here today. Like all stories, it has a beginning. My work, for a long time, has been involved in education, in teaching people practical skills for sustainability, teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food, how to build buildings using local materials, how to generate their own energy, and so on. I lived in Ireland, built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland, and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing. But all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model, and moderating what comes in at one end, and moderating the outputs at the other end. And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly. And in order to introduce you to that, I've got something here that I'm going to unveil, which is one of the great marvels of the modern age. And it's something so astounding and so astonishing that I think maybe as I remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate. If you could help me with that it would be fantastic. (Laughter) This is a liter of oil. This bottle of oil, distilled over a hundred million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor — equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you. We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically. We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity. Yet, when we take a step back, and look over the span of history, at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. And it's increasingly clear that we aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that we're going to have this at our disposal forever. For every four barrels of oil that we consume, we only discover one. And that gap continues to widen. There is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling. In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it. Completely unprecedented, historically. Already that's fallen to about 11. And that's why, now, the new breakthroughs, the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta, or at the bottom of the oceans. There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world. But of those, 65 have already passed their peak. The moment when the world on average passes this peak, people wonder when that's going to happen. And there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last July when the oil prices were so high. But are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side? No. But the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are. There is also the issue of climate change, is the other thing that underpins this transition approach. But the thing that I notice, as I talk to climate scientists, is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes, as the data that's coming in, which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about. So the IPCC said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100, in their worst case scenario. Actually, if current trends continue, it could all be gone in five or 10 years' time. If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms, it would offset all the savings that we need to make, in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change. We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization. But I'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us. "The generation that lived at the top of the mountain, that partied so hard, and so abused its inheritance." And one of the ways I like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil, before we had fossil fuels, and people relied on their own muscle, animal muscle energy, or a little bit of wind, little bit of water energy. We had stories like "The Seven-League Boots": the giant who had these boots, where, once you put them on, with every stride you could cover seven leagues, or 21 miles, a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal. Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot, where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words, this pot would just make as much food as you liked, without you having to do any work, provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge. Otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge. There is the story of "The Elves and the Shoemaker." The people who make shoes go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all the shoes are magically made for them. It's something that was unimaginable to people then. Now we have the seven-league boots in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet. We have the magic porridge pot in the form of Walmart and Tesco. And we have the elves in the form of China. But we don't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been. And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now, as we look forward about where we're going to go. And I would argue that there are four. There is the idea of business as usual, that the future will be like the present, just more of it. But as we've seen over the last year, I think that's an idea that is increasingly coming into question. And in terms of climate change, is something that is not actually feasible. There is the idea of hitting the wall, that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse. This is a popular story in some places. The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything, that technology can somehow get us through this completely. And it's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks, the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis, that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints, the idea that we'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side, the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world. But the world isn't Second Life. We can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse. And as we sit, exchanging free ideas with each other, there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers, extracting the minerals to make all of those things. The breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances, usually at the expense of the local, more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past, which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled. We can be astonishingly inventive and creative. But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same thing. What I'm involved with is the transition response. And this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face, and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need. It's something which has spread incredibly fast. And it is something which has several characteristics. It's viral. It seems to spread under the radar very, very quickly. It's open source. It's something which everybody who's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it. It's self-organizing. There is no great central organization that pushes this; people just pick up an idea and they run with it, and they implement it where they are. It's solutions-focused. It's very much looking at what people can do where they are, to respond to this. It's sensitive to place and to scale. Transitional is completely different. Transition groups in Chile, transition groups in the U.S., transition groups here, what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to. It learns very much from its mistakes. And it feels historic. It tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary. And it's a process which is really joyful. People have a huge amount of fun doing this, reconnecting with other people as they do it. One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience. And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. And it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. When they encounter shock from the outside that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces. And I think it's a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said. When our supermarkets have only two or three days' worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation that's so vulnerable. Resilience runs much deeper: it's about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us. This is a photograph of the Bristol and District Market Gardeners Association, in 1897. This is at a time when the city of Bristol, which is quite close to here, was surrounded by commercial market gardens, which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town, and created a lot of employment for people, as well. There was a degree of resilience, if you like, at that time, which we can now only look back on with envy. So how does this transition idea work? So basically, you have a group of people who are excited by the idea. They pick up some of the tools that we've developed. They start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town. They show films, they give talks, and so on. It's a process which is playful and creative and informative. Then they start to form working groups, looking at different aspects of this, and then from that, there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable. So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland, where I was teaching, and has since spread. There are now over 200 formal transition projects. And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage. They are mulling whether they're going to take it further. And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff. But what do they actually do? You know, it's a kind of nice idea, but what do they actually do on the ground? Well, I think it's really important to make the point that actually you know, this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own. We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on. We need national responses. We need local government responses. But all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front, making unelectable policies electable, over the next 5 to 10 years. Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects, like community-supported agriculture schemes, urban food production, creating local food directories, and so on. A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies, community-owned energy companies, where the community can invest money into itself, to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need. A lot of places are working with their local schools. Newent in the Forest of Dean: big polytunnel they built for the school; the kids are learning how to grow food. Promoting recycling, things like garden-share, that matches up people who don't have a garden who would like to grow food, with people who have gardens they aren't using anymore. Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces. And also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies. This is Lewes in Sussex, who have recently launched the Lewes Pound, a currency that you can only spend within the town, as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy. You take it anywhere else, it's not worth anything. But actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively. Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan, which is basically to develop a plan B for the town. Most of our local authorities, when they sit down to plan for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of a community, still start by assuming that there will be more energy, more cars, more housing, more jobs, more growth, and so on. What does it look like if that's not the case? And how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody? As a friend of mine says, "Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for." And that's certainly been my experience with transition. From three years ago, it just being an idea, this has become something that has virally swept around the world. We're getting a lot of interest from government. Ed Miliband, the energy minister of this country, was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener. Which he did — (Laughter) (Applause) — and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea. There are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities, Leicestershire and Somerset. And in Stroud, the transition group there, in effect, wrote the local government's food plan. And the head of the council said, "If we didn't have Transition Stroud, we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time." As we see the spread of it, we see national hubs emerging. In Scotland, the Scottish government's climate change fund has funded Transition Scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this. And we see it all over the place as well now. But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now, but that things are already inevitably changing, and what we need to do is to work creatively with that, based on asking the right questions. I think I'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories. Because I think stories are vital here. And actually the stories that we tell ourselves, we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here. And one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing. Stories about the community that's produced its own 21 pound note, for example, the school that's turned its car park into a food garden, the community that's founded its own energy company. And for me, one of the great stories recently was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House to create a vegetable garden. Because the last time that was done, when Eleanor Roosevelt did it, it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States. So the question I'd like to leave you with, really, is — for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive, how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions, while also building resilience? Personally, I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil. I've been astonishingly lucky, we've been astonishingly lucky. But let us honor what it has bought us, and move forward from this point. Because if we cling to it, and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices, the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable. And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us, and that the Oil Age has done for us, we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient, more nourishing, and in which, we find ourselves fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Turning dunes into architecture

{0: 'Magnus Larsson hopes to build new structures in the desert -- by using bacteria to turn shifting sand into a solid mass.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

It's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen, and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire African continent. About the size of the Great Wall of China, this would hardly be an invisible structure. And yet it's made from parts that are invisible, or near-invisible, to the naked eye: bacteria and grains of sand. Now, as architects we're trained to solve problems. But I don't really believe in architectural problems; I only believe in opportunities. Which is why I'll show you a threat, and an architectural response. The threat is desertification. My response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand, stretching across the desert. Now, sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions. It is simple and complex. It is peaceful and violent. It is always the same, never the same, endlessly fascinating. One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. That's a cyclical process. As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune. In a way, the static, stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand. But, moving mountains can be dangerous. Let me try and explain why. Dry areas cover more than one third of the Earth's land surfaces. Some are already deserts; others are being seriously degraded by the sand. Just south of the Sahara we find the Sahel. The name means "edge of the desert." And this is the region most closely associated with desertification. It was here in the late '60s and early '70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid, with about up to 250,000 dying. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen again. And it's one that gets very little attention. In our accelerated media culture, desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines. It's nothing like a tsunami or a Katrina: too few crying children and smashed up houses. And yet desertification is a major threat on all continents, affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world's agricultural drylands. It seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people, and especially in Africa and China. And it is largely an issue that we've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources. So, we get climate change. We get droughts, increased desertification, crashing food systems, water scarcity, famine, forced migration, political instability, warfare, crisis. That's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously. But, how far away is it? I went to Sokoto in northern Nigeria to try and find out how far away it is. The dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year. That's the Sahara eating up almost [two meters] a day of the arable land, physically pushing people away from their homes. Here I am — I'm the second person on the left — (Laughter) with the elders in Gidan-Kara, a tiny village outside of Sokoto. They had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it. So, they moved the entire village, hut by hut. This is where the village used to be. It took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune, which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location. That's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to. If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away, and abandon your home and your life as you know it. Now, sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts. And still, those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands. Four years ago, 23 African countries came together to create the Great Green Wall Sahara. A fantastic project, the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the African continent, from Mauritania in the west, all the way to Djibouti in the east. If you want to stop a sand dune from moving, what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest. And a good way of doing that, the most efficient way, is to use some kind of sand catcher. Trees or cacti are good for this. But, one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood. Now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they won't get chopped down. This sandstone wall that I'm proposing essentially does three things. It adds roughness to the dune's surface, to the texture of the dune's surface, binding the grains. It provides a physical support structure for the trees, and it creates physical spaces, habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes. If people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees, protect them from humans, and from some of the forces of nature. Inside of the dunes we find shade. We can start harvesting condensation, and start greening the desert from within. Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us. So, the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us. But, by now, you're probably asking, how am I planning to solidify a sand dune? How do we glue those grains of sand together? And the answer is, perhaps, that you use these guys, Bacillus pasteurii, a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes, and does precisely that. It takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it. These images from the American Society for Microbiology show us the process. What happens is, you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand, and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains. A chemical process produces calcite, which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together. The whole cementation process takes about 24 hours. I learned about this from a professor at U.C. Davis called Jason DeJong. He managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes. Here I am, playing the part of the mad scientist, working with the bugs at UCL in London, trying to solidify them. So, how much would this cost? I'm not an economist, very much not, but I did, quite literally, a back of the envelope calculation — (Laughter) — and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars. And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars. How do we construct something like this? Well, I'll quickly show you two options. The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it. Then, a few years afterwards, using permacultural strategies, we green that part of the desert. The second alternative would be to use injection piles. So, we pushed the piles down through the dune, and we create an initial bacterial surface. We then pull the piles up through the dune and we're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up. So, we have a way of turning sand into sandstone, and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes. But, what should they look like? Well, I was inspired, for my architectural form, by tafoni, which look a little bit like this, this is a model representation of it. These are cavernous rock structures that I found on the site in Sokoto. And I realized that if I scaled them up, they would provide me with good spatial qualities, for ventilation, for thermal comfort, and for other things. Now, part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature, obviously, as the bacteria do their work. And I think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually. I think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice. We see the result, the traces, if you like, of the Bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments. Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way. That's not true at all. It's a natural process. It goes on in nature today, and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them. So, there it is — architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself. Sand-stopping devices, made from sand. The world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century. In a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands, this could prove disastrous. And quite frankly, we're putting our heads in the sand. If nothing else, I would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion. But, if I had something like a TED wish, it would be to actually get it built, to start building this habitable wall, this very, very long, but very narrow city in the desert, built into the dunescape itself. It's not only something that supports trees, but something that connects people and countries together. I would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure, and leave you with a sentence by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges said that "nothing is built on stone, everything is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." Now, there are many details left to explore in this scheme — political, practical, ethical, financial. My design, as it takes you down the rabbit hole, is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world. But, it's a beginning, it's a vision. As Borges would have it, it's the sand. And I think now is really the time to turn it into stone. Thank you. (Applause)

Dance to change the world

{0: 'As the leader of Darpana, Mallika Sarabhai is a pioneer in using dance and the arts for social change.'}

TEDIndia 2009

One day a one-eyed monkey came into the forest. Under a tree she saw a woman meditating furiously. The one-eyed monkey recognized the woman, a Sekhri. She was the wife of an even more famous Brahmin. To watch her better, the one-eyed monkey climbed onto the tree. Just then, with a loud bang, the heavens opened. (Claps) And the god Indra jumped into the clearing. Indra saw the woman, a Sekhri. Ah-hah. The woman paid him no heed. So, Indra, attracted, threw her onto the floor, and proceeded to rape her. Then Indra disappeared. (Clap! Clap!) And the woman's husband, the Brahmin, appeared. He realized at once what had happened. So, he petitioned the higher gods so that he may have justice. So, the god Vishnu arrived. "Are there any witnesses?" "Just a one-eyed monkey," said the Brahmin. Now, the one-eyed monkey really wanted for the woman, a Sekhri, to get justice, so she retold events exactly as they had happened. Vishnu gave his judgment. "The god Indra has sinned, in that he has sinned against ... a Brahmin. May he be called to wash away his sins." So, Indra arrived, and performed the sacrifice of the horse. And so it transpired that a horse was killed, a god was made sin-free, a Brahmin's ego was appeased, a woman ... was ruined, and a one-eyed monkey was left ... very confused at what we humans call justice. In India there is a rape every three minutes. In India, only 25 percent of rapes come to a police station, and of these 25 percent that come to a police station, convictions are only in four percent of the cases. That's a lot of women who don't get justice. And it's not only about women. Look around you, look at your own countries. There is a certain pattern in who gets charged with crimes. If you're in Australia, it's mostly aboriginals who are in jail. If you're in India, it's either Muslims or Adivasis, our tribals, the Naxalites. If you're in the U.S., it's mostly the blacks. There is a trend here. And the Brahmins and the gods, like in my story, always get to tell their truth as The Truth. So, have we all become one-eyed — two-eyed instead of one-eyed — monkeys? Have we stopped seeing injustice? Good morning. (Applause) You know, I have told this story close to 550 times, in audiences in 40 countries, to school students, to black-tie dinners at the Smithsonian, and so on and so forth, and every time it hits something. Now, if I were to go into the same crowd and say, "I want to lecture you about justice and injustice," they would say, "Thank you very much, we have other things to do." And that is the astonishing power of art. Art can go through where other things can't. You can't have barriers, because it breaks through your prejudices, breaks through everything that you have as your mask, that says, "I am this, I am that, I am that." No. It breaks through those. And it reaches somewhere where other things don't. And in a world where attitudes are so difficult to change, we need a language that reaches through. Hitler knew it; he used Wagner to make all the Nazis feel wonderful and Aryan. And Mr. Berlusconi knows it, as he sits atop this huge empire of media and television and so on and so forth. And all of the wonderful creative minds who are in all the advertising agencies, and who help corporate sell us things we absolutely don't require, they also know the power of the arts. For me it came very early. When I was a young child, my mother, who was a choreographer, came upon a phenomenon that worried her. It was a phenomenon where young brides were committing suicide in rural Gujarat, because they were being forced to bring more and more money for their in-laws' families. And she created a dance piece which then Prime Minister Nehru saw. He came to talk to her and said, "What is this about?" She told him and he set out the first inquiry into what today we call Dowry Dance. Imagine a dance piece for the first inquiry into something that even today kills thousands of women. Many years later, when I was working with the director Peter Brook in "The Mahabharata" playing this feisty feminine feminist called Draupadi, I had similar experiences. Big fat black mamas in the Bronx used to come and say, "Hey girl, that's it!" And then these trendy young things in the Sorbonne would say, "Madame Draupadi, on n'est pas feministe, mais ça? Ça!" And then aboriginal women in Africa would come and say, "This is it!" And I thought, "This is what we need, as a language." We had somebody from public health. And Devdutt also mentioned public health. Well, millions of people around the world die of waterborne disease every year. And that's because there is no clean water to drink, or in countries like India, people don't know that they need to soap their hands before defecation. So, what do they do? They drink the water they know is dirty, they get cholera, they get diarrhea, they get jaundice and they die. And governments have not been able to provide clean water. They try and build it. They try and build pipelines; it doesn't happen. And the MNCs give them machines that they cannot afford. So what do you do? Do you let them die? Well, somebody had a great idea. And it was a simple idea. It was an idea that could not profit anybody but would help health in every field. Most houses in Asia and India have a cotton garment. And it was discovered, and WHO endorses this, that a clean cotton garment folded eight times over, can reduce bacteria up to 80 percent from water sieved through. So, why aren't governments blaring this on television? Why isn't it on every poster across the third world? Because there is no profit in it. Because nobody can get a kickback. But it still needs to get to people. And here is one of the ways we get it to people. [Video] Woman: Then get me one of those fancy water purifiers. Man: You know how expensive those are. I have a solution that requires neither machine, nor wood, nor cooking gas. Woman: What solution? Man: Listen, go fetch that cotton sari you have. Boy: Grand-dad, tell me the solution please. Man: I will tell all of you. Just wait. Woman: Here father. (Man: Is it clean?) Woman: Yes, of course. Man: Then do as I tell you. Fold the sari into eight folds. Woman: All right, father. Man: And you, you count that she does it right. (Boy: All right, grand-dad.) Man: One, two, three, four folds we make. All the germs from the water we take. Chorus: One, two, three, four folds we make. All the germs from the water we take. Five, six, seven, eight folds we make. Our drinking water safe we make. Five, six, seven, eight folds we make. Our drinking water safe we make. Woman: Here, father, your eight-times folded cotton sari. Man: So this is the cotton sari. And through this we will have clean water. (Applause) I think it's safe to say that all of us here are deeply concerned about the escalating violence in our daily lives. While universities are trying to devise courses in conflict resolution, and governments are trying to stop skirmishes at borders, we are surrounded by violence, whether it's road rage, or whether it's domestic violence, whether it's a teacher beating up a student and killing her because she hasn't done her homework, it's everywhere. So, why are we not doing something to actually attend that problem on a day to day basis? What are we doing to try and make children and young people realize that violence is something that we indulge in, that we can stop, and that there are other ways of actually taking violence, taking anger, taking frustrations into different things that do not harm other people. Well, here is one such way. (Video) (Laughs) You are peaceful people. Your parents were peaceful people. Your grandparents were peaceful people. So much peace in one place? How could it be otherwise? (Music) But, what if ... Yes. What if ... One little gene in you has been trying to get through? From your beginnings in Africa, through each generation, may be passed on to you, in your creation. It's a secret urge, hiding deep in you. And if it's in you, then it's in me too. Oh, dear. It's what made you smack your baby brother, stamp on a cockroach, scratch your mother. It's the feeling that wells up from deep inside, when your husband comes home drunk and you wanna tan his hide. Want to kill that cyclist on the way to work, and string up your cousin 'cause she's such a jerk. Oh, dear. And as for outsiders, white, black or brown, tar and feather them, and whip them out of town. It's that little gene. It's small and it's mean. Too small for detection, it's your built-in protection. Adrenaline, kill. It'll give you the will. Yes, you'd better face it 'cause you can't displace it. You're V-I-O-L-E-N-T. Cause you're either a victim, or on top, like me. Goodbye, Abraham Lincoln. Goodbye, Mahatma Gandhi. Goodbye, Martin Luther King. Hello, gangs from this neighborhood killing gangs from that neighborhood. Hello governments of rich countries selling arms to governments of poor countries who can't even afford to give them food. Hello civilization. Hello, 21st century. Look what we've ... look what they've done. (Applause) Mainstream art, cinema, has been used across the world to talk about social issues. A few years ago we had a film called Rang De Basanti, which suddenly spawned thousands of young people wanting to volunteer for social change. In Venezuela, one of the most popular soap operas has a heroine called Crystal. And when, onscreen, Crystal got breast cancer, 75,000 more young women went to have mammographies done. And of course, "The Vagina Monologues" we know about. And there are stand-up comics who are talking about racial issues, about ethnic issues. So, why is it, that if we think that we all agree that we need a better world, we need a more just world, why is it that we are not using the one language that has consistently showed us that we can break down barriers, that we can reach people? What I need to say to the planners of the world, the governments, the strategists is, "You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast." Because, any future planning, if 2048 is when we want to get there, unless the arts are put with the scientists, with the economists, with all those who prepare for the future, badly, we're not going to get there. And unless this is actually internalized, it won't happen. So, what is it that we require? What is it that we need? We need to break down our vision of what planners are, of what the correct way of a path is. And to say all these years of trying to make a better world, and we have failed. There are more people being raped. There are more wars. There are more people dying of simple things. So, something has got to give. And that is what I want. Can I have my last audio track please? Once there was a princess who whistled beautifully. (Whistling) Her father the king said, "Don't whistle." Her mother the queen said, "Hai, don't whistle." But the princess continued whistling. (Whistling) The years went by and the princess grew up into a beautiful young woman, who whistled even more beautifully. (Whistling) Her father the king said, "Who will marry a whistling princess?" Her mother the queen said, "Who will marry a whistling princess?" But the king had an idea. He announced a Swayamvara. He invited all the princes to come and defeat his daughter at whistling. "Whoever defeats my daughter shall have half my kingdom and her hand in marriage!" Soon the palace filled with princes whistling. (Whistling) Some whistled badly. Some whistled well. But nobody could defeat the princess. "Now what shall we do?" said the king. "Now what shall we do?" said the queen. But the princess said, "Father, Mother, don't worry. I have an idea. I am going to go to each of these young men and I am going to ask them if they defeated correctly. And if somebody answers, that shall be my wish." So she went up to each and said, "Do you accept that I have defeated you?" And they said, "Me? Defeated by a woman? No way, that's impossible! No no no no no! That's not possible." Till finally one prince said, "Princess, I accept, you have defeated me." "Uh-huh ..." she said. "Father, mother, this man shall be my wife." (Whistling) Thank you. (Applause)

Why nations should pursue soft power

{0: "After a long career at the UN, and a parallel life as a novelist, Shashi Tharoor became a member of India's Parliament. He spent 10 months as India's Minister for External Affairs, building connections between India and the world."}

TEDIndia 2009

As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower. In fact, the American publishers of my book, "The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cell Phone," added a gratuitous subtitle saying, "India: The next 21st-century power." And I just don't think that's what India's all about, or should be all about. Indeed, what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership seems to me terribly archaic. It's redolent of James Bond movies and Kipling ballads. After all, what constitutes a world leader? If it's population, we're on course to top the charts. We will overtake China by 2034. Is it military strength? Well, we have the world's fourth largest army. Is it nuclear capacity? We know we have that. The Americans have even recognized it, in an agreement. Is it the economy? Well, we have now the fifth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. And we continue to grow. When the rest of the world took a beating last year, we grew at 6.7 percent. But, somehow, none of that adds up to me, to what I think India really can aim to contribute in the world, in this part of the 21st century. And so I wondered, could what the future beckons for India to be all about be a combination of these things allied to something else, the power of example, the attraction of India's culture, what, in other words, people like to call "soft power." Soft power is a concept invented by a Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, a friend of mine. And, very simply, and I'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here, it's essentially the ability of a country to attract others because of its culture, its political values, its foreign policies. And, you know, lots of countries do this. He was writing initially about the States, but we know the Alliance Francaise is all about French soft power, the British Council. The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the Voice of America and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity. So soft power is something that really emerges partly because of governments, but partly despite governments. And in the information era we all live in today, what we might call the TED age, I'd say that countries are increasingly being judged by a global public that's been fed on an incessant diet of Internet news, of televised images, of cellphone videos, of email gossip. In other words, all sorts of communication devices are telling us the stories of countries, whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories. Now, in this age, again, countries with access to multiple channels of communication and information have a particular advantage. And of course they have more influence, sometimes, about how they're seen. India has more all-news TV channels than any country in the world, in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together. But, the fact still is that it's not just that. In order to have soft power, you have to be connected. One might argue that India has become an astonishingly connected country. I think you've already heard the figures. We've been selling 15 million cellphones a month. Currently there are 509 million cellphones in Indian hands, in India. And that makes us larger than the U.S. as a telephone market. In fact, those 15 million cellphones are the most connections that any country, including the U.S. and China, has ever established in the history of telecommunications. But, what perhaps some of you don't realize is how far we've come to get there. You know, when I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone. But sometimes it just sat there. I went to high school in Calcutta. And we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer. But half the time we would pick it up with an expectant look on our faces, there would be no dial tone. If there was a dial tone and you dialed a number, the odds were two in three you wouldn't get the number you were intending to reach. In fact the words "wrong number" were more popular than the word "Hello." (Laughter) If you then wanted to connect to another city, let's say from Calcutta you wanted to call Delhi, you'd have to book something called a trunk call, and then sit by the phone all day, waiting for it to come through. Or you could pay eight times the going rate for something called a lightning call. But, lightning struck rather slowly in our country in those days, so, it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through. In fact, so woeful was our telephone service that a Member of Parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this. And the Then-Communications Minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country communications are a luxury, not a right, that the government had no obligation to provide better service, and if the honorable Member wasn't satisfied with his telephone, could he please return it, since there was an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones in India. Now, fast-forward to today and this is what you see: the 15 million cell phones a month. But what is most striking is who is carrying those cell phones. You know, if you visit friends in the suburbs of Delhi, on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart that looks like it was designed in the 16th century, wielding a coal-fired steam iron that might have been invented in the 18th century. He's called an isthri wala. But he's carrying a 21st-century instrument. He's carrying a cell phone because most incoming calls are free, and that's how he gets orders from the neighborhood, to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed. The other day I was in Kerala, my home state, at the country farm of a friend, about 20 kilometers away from any place you'd consider urban. And it was a hot day and he said, "Hey, would you like some fresh coconut water?" And it's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink on a hot day in the tropics, so I said sure. And he whipped out his cellphone, dialed the number, and a voice said, "I'm up here." And right on top of the nearest coconut tree, with a hatchet in one hand and a cell phone in the other, was a local toddy tapper, who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink. Fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cell phones. When they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast to find out where they get the best possible prices. Farmers now, who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor to find out if the market town was open, if the market was on, whether the product they'd harvested could be sold, what price they'd fetch. They'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge to the market town to get that information and come back, then they'd load the cart. Today they're saving half a day's labor with a two minute phone call. So this empowerment of the underclass is the real result of India being connected. And that transformation is part of where India is heading today. But, of course that's not the only thing about India that's spreading. You've got Bollywood. My attitude to Bollywood is best summarized in the tale of the two goats at a Bollywood garbage dump — Mr. Shekhar Kapur, forgive me — and they're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a Bollywood studio. And the first goat, chewing away, says, "You know, this film is not bad." And the second goat says, "No, the book was better." (Laughter) I usually tend to think that the book is usually better, but, having said that, the fact is that Bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of Indian-ness and Indian culture around the globe, not just in the Indian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K., but to the screens of Arabs and Africans, of Senegalese and Syrians. I've met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother in a village in Senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital city of Dakar, just to watch a Bollywood movie. She can't understand the dialogue. She's illiterate, so she can't read the French subtitles. But these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps, and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action. She goes away with stars in her eyes about India, as a result. And this is happening more and more. Afghanistan, we know what a serious security problem Afghanistan is for so many of us in the world. India doesn't have a military mission there. You know what was India's biggest asset in Afghanistan in the last seven years? One simple fact: you couldn't try to call an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. Why? Because that was the moment when the Indian television soap opera, "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi," dubbed into Dari, was telecast on Tolo T.V. And it was the most popular television show in Afghan history. Every Afghan family wanted to watch it. They had to suspend functions at 8:30. Weddings were reported to be interrupted so guests could cluster around the T.V. set, and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom. Crime went up at 8:30. I have read a Reuters dispatch — so this is not Indian propaganda, a British news agency — about how robbers in the town of Musarri Sharif* stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers, its hubcaps, its sideview mirrors, any moving part they could find, at 8:30, because the watchmen were busy watching the T.V. rather than minding the store. And they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show's heroine, "Tulsi Zindabad": "Long live Tulsi." (Laughter) That's soft power. And that is what India is developing through the "E" part of TED: its own entertainment industry. The same is true, of course — we don't have time for too many more examples — but it's true of our music, of our dance, of our art, yoga, ayurveda, even Indian cuisine. I mean, the proliferation of Indian restaurants since I first went abroad as a student, in the mid '70s, and what I see today, you can't go to a mid-size town in Europe or North America and not find an Indian restaurant. It may not be a very good one. But, today in Britain, for example, Indian restaurants in Britain employ more people than the coal mining, ship building and iron and steel industries combined. So the empire can strike back. (Applause) But, with this increasing awareness of India, with yoga and ayurveda, and so on, with tales like Afghanistan, comes something vital in the information era, the sense that in today's world it's not the side of the bigger army that wins, it's the country that tells a better story that prevails. And India is, and must remain, in my view, the land of the better story. Stereotypes are changing. I mean, again, having gone to the U.S. as a student in the mid '70s, I knew what the image of India was then, if there was an image at all. Today, people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere speak of the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Technology with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT. This can sometimes have unintended consequences. OK. I had a friend, a history major like me, who was accosted at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, by an anxiously perspiring European saying, "You're Indian, you're Indian! Can you help me fix my laptop?" (Laughter) We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus. But that too is transforming the Indian story around the world. But, there is something more substantive to that. The story rests on a fundamental platform of political pluralism. It's a civilizational story to begin with. Because India has been an open society for millennia. India gave refuge to the Jews, fleeing the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians, and said thereafter by the Romans. In fact, legend has is that when Doubting Thomas, the Apostle, Saint Thomas, landed on the shores of Kerala, my home state, somewhere around 52 A.D., he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. And to this day remains the only Jewish diaspora in the history of the Jewish people, which has never encountered a single incident of anti-semitism. (Applause) That's the Indian story. Islam came peacefully to the south, slightly more differently complicated history in the north. But all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in India. You know, we just celebrated, this year, our general elections, the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history. And the next one will be even bigger, because our voting population keeps growing by 20 million a year. But, the fact is that the last elections, five years ago, gave the world extraordinary phenomenon of an election being won by a woman political leader of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Sonia Gandhi, who then made way for a Sikh, Mohan Singh, to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam, in a country 81 percent Hindu. (Applause) This is India, and of course it's all the more striking because it was four years later that we all applauded the U.S., the oldest democracy in the modern world, more than 220 years of free and fair elections, which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president who wasn't white, male or Christian. So, maybe — oh sorry, he is Christian, I beg your pardon — and he is male, but he isn't white. All the others have been all those three. (Laughter) All his predecessors have been all those three, and that's the point I was trying to make. (Laughter) But, the issue is that when I talked about that example, it's not just about talking about India, it's not propaganda. Because ultimately, that electoral outcome had nothing to do with the rest of the world. It was essentially India being itself. And ultimately, it seems to me, that always works better than propaganda. Governments aren't very good at telling stories. But people see a society for what it is, and that, it seems to me, is what ultimately will make a difference in today's information era, in today's TED age. So India now is no longer the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion, because we have every ethnicity known to mankind, practically, we've every religion know to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism, though that has some Hindu elements somewhere. We have 23 official languages that are recognized in our Constitution. And those of you who cashed your money here might be surprised to see how many scripts there are on the rupee note, spelling out the denominations. We've got all of that. We don't even have geography uniting us, because the natural geography of the subcontinent framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked by the partition with Pakistan in 1947. In fact, you can't even take the name of the country for granted, because the name "India" comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. But, the whole point is that India is the nationalism of an idea. It's the idea of an ever-ever-land, emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy. That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one. And it's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter, and still rally around a consensus. And the consensus is of a very simple principle, that in a diverse plural democracy like India you don't really have to agree on everything all the time, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The great success story of India, a country that so many learned scholars and journalists assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and '60s, is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus. Now, that is the India that is emerging into the 21st century. And I do want to make the point that if there is anything worth celebrating about India, it isn't military muscle, economic power. All of that is necessary, but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome. Somebody said we are super poor, and we are also super power. We can't really be both of those. We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the infrastructural things we need to do, and the software of development, the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a decent school, and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives that can transform themselves. But, it's all taking place, this great adventure of conquering those challenges, those real challenges which none of us can pretend don't exist. But, it's all taking place in an open society, in a rich and diverse and plural civilization, in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. That's why India belongs at TED, and that's why TED belongs in India. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Global ethic vs. national interest

{0: "Britain's former prime minister Gordon Brown played a key role in shaping the G20 nations' response to the world's financial crisis, and was a powerful advocate for a coordinated global response to problems such as climate change, poverty and social justice."}

TEDGlobal 2009

Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Prime Minister, that was both fascinating and quite inspiring. So, you're calling for a global ethic. Would you describe that as global citizenship? Is that an idea that you believe in, and how would you define that? Gordon Brown: It is about global citizenship and recognizing our responsibilities to others. There is so much to do over the next few years that is obvious to so many of us to build a better world. And there is so much shared sense of what we need to do, that it is vital that we all come together. But we don't necessarily have the means to do so. So there are challenges to be met. I believe the concept of global citizenship will simply grow out of people talking to each other across continents. But of course the task is to create the institutions that make that global society work. But I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which massive changes in technology make possible the linking up of people across the world. CA: But people get excited about this idea of global citizenship, but then they get confused a bit again when they start thinking about patriotism, and how to combine these two. I mean, you're elected as Prime Minister with a brief to bat for Britain. How do you reconcile the two things? GB: Well, of course national identity remains important. But it's not at the expense of people accepting their global responsibilities. And I think one of the problems of recession is that people become more protectionist, they look in on themselves, they try to protect their own nation, perhaps at the expense of other nations. When you actually look at the motor of the world economy, it cannot move forward unless there is trade between the different countries. And any nation that would become protectionist over the next few years would deprive itself of the chance of getting the benefits of growth in the world economy. So, you've got to have a healthy sense of patriotism; that's absolutely important. But you've got to realize that this world has changed fundamentally, and the problems we have cannot be solved by one nation and one nation alone. CA: Well, indeed. But what do you do when the two come into conflict and you're forced to make a decision that either is in Britain's interest, or the interest of Britons, or citizens elsewhere in the world? GB: Well I think we can persuade people that what is necessary for Britain's long-term interests, what is necessary for America's long-term interests, is proper engagement with the rest of the world, and taking the action that is necessary. There is a great story, again, told about Richard Nixon. 1958, Ghana becomes independent, so it is just over 50 years ago. Richard Nixon goes to represent the United States government at the celebrations for independence in Ghana. And it's one of his first outings as Vice President to an African country. He doesn't quite know what to do, so he starts going around the crowd and starts talking to people and he says to people in this rather unique way, "How does it feel to be free?" And he's going around, "How does it feel to be free?" "How does it feel to be free?" And then someone says, "How should I know? I come from Alabama." (Laughter) And that was the 1950s. Now, what is remarkable is that civil rights in America were achieved in the 1960s. But what is equally remarkable is socioeconomic rights in Africa have not moved forward very fast even since the age of colonialism. And yet, America and Africa have got a common interest. And we have got to realize that if we don't link up with those people who are sensible voices and democratic voices in Africa, to work together for common causes, then the danger of Al Qaeda and related groups making progress in Africa is very big. So, I would say that what seems sometimes to be altruism, in relation to Africa, or in relation to developing countries, is more than that. It is enlightened self-interest for us to work with other countries. And I would say that national interest and, if you like, what is the global interest to tackle poverty and climate change do, in the long run, come together. And whatever the short-run price for taking action on climate change or on security, or taking action to provide opportunities for people for education, these are prices that are worth paying so that you build a stronger global society where people feel able to feel comfortable with each other and are able to communicate with each other in such a way that you can actually build stronger links between different countries. CA: I still just want to draw out on this issue. So, you're on vacation at a nice beach, and word comes through that there's been a massive earthquake and that there is a tsunami advancing on the beach. One end of the beach, there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to — (Laughter) you have time to alert one house. What do you do? (Laughter) GB: Modern communications. (Applause) Alert both. (Applause) I do agree that my responsibility is first of all to make sure that people in our country are safe. And I wouldn't like anything that is said today to suggest that I am diminishing the importance of the responsibility that each leader has for their own country. But I'm trying to suggest that there is a huge opportunity open to us that was never open to us before. But the power to communicate across borders allows us to organize the world in a different way. And I think, look at the tsunami, it's a classic example. Where was the early warning systems? Where was the world acting together to deal with the problems that they knew arose from the potential for earthquakes, as well as the potential for climate change? And when the world starts to work together, with better early-warning systems, you can deal with some of these problems in a better way. I just think we're not seeing, at the moment, the huge opportunities open to us by the ability of people to cooperate in a world where either there was isolationism before or there was limited alliances based on convenience which never actually took you to deal with some of the central problems. CA: But I think this is the frustration that perhaps a lot of people have, like people in the audience here, where we love the kind of language that you're talking about. It is inspiring. A lot of us believe that that has to be the world's future. And yet, when the situation changes, you suddenly hear politicians talking as if, you know, for example, the life of one American soldier is worth countless numbers of Iraqi civilians. When the pedal hits the metal, the idealism can get moved away. I'm just wondering whether you can see that changing over time, whether you see in Britain that there are changing attitudes, and that people are actually more supportive of the kind of global ethic that you talk about. GB: I think every religion, every faith, and I'm not just talking here to people of faith or religion — it has this global ethic at the center of its credo. And whether it's Jewish or whether it's Muslim or whether it's Hindu, or whether it's Sikh, the same global ethic is at the heart of each of these religions. So, I think you're dealing with something that people instinctively see as part of their moral sense. So you're building on something that is not pure self-interest. You're building on people's ideas and values — that perhaps they're candles that burn very dimly on certain occasions. But it is a set of values that cannot, in my view, be extinguished. Then the question is, how do you make that change happen? How do you persuade people that it is in their interest to build strong — After the Second World War, we built institutions, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Marshall Plan. There was a period in which people talked about an act of creation, because these institutions were so new. But they are now out of date. They don't deal with the problems. You can't deal with the environmental problem through existing institutions. You can't deal with the security problem in the way that you need to. You can't deal with the economic and financial problem. So we have got to rebuild our global institutions, build them in a way that is suitable to the challenges of this time. And I believe that if you look at the biggest challenge we face, it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules. So, I come back to my initial point. Sometimes you think things are impossible. Nobody would have said 50 years ago that apartheid would have gone in 1990, or that the Berlin wall would have fallen at the turn of the '80s and '90s, or that polio could be eradicated, or perhaps 60 years ago, nobody would have said a man could gone to the Moon. All these things have happened. By tackling the impossible, you make the impossible possible. CA: And we have had a speaker who said that very thing, and swallowed a sword right after that, which was quite dramatic. (Laughter) GB: Followed my sword and swallow. CA: But, surely a true global ethic is for someone to say, "I believe that the life of every human on the planet is worth the same, equal consideration, regardless of nationality and religion." And you have politicians who have — you're elected. In a way, you can't say that. Even if, as a human being, you believe that, you can't say that. You're elected for Britain's interests. GB: We have a responsibility to protect. I mean look, 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, and all the treaties before that, the Treaty of Westphalia and everything else, were about protecting the sovereign right of countries to do what they want. Since then, the world has moved forward, partly as a result of what happened with the Holocaust, and people's concern about the rights of individuals within territories where they need protection, partly because of what we saw in Rwanda, partly because of what we saw in Bosnia. The idea of the responsibility to protect all individuals who are in situations where they are at humanitarian risk is now being established as a principle which governs the world. So, while I can't automatically say that Britain will rush to the aid of any citizen of any country, in danger, I can say that Britain is in a position where we're working with other countries so that this idea that you have a responsibility to protect people who are victims of either genocide or humanitarian attack, is something that is accepted by the whole world. Now, in the end, that can only be achieved if your international institutions work well enough to be able to do so. And that comes back to what the future role of the United Nations, and what it can do, actually is. But, the responsibility to protect is a new idea that is, in a sense, taken over from the idea of self-determination as the principle governing the international community. CA: Can you picture, in our lifetimes, a politician ever going out on a platform of the kind of full-form global ethic, global citizenship? And basically saying, "I believe that all people across the planet have equal consideration, and if in power we will act in that way. And we believe that the people of this country are also now global citizens and will support that ethic." GB: Is that not what we're doing in the debate about climate change? We're saying that you cannot solve the problem of climate change in one country; you've got to involve all countries. You're saying that you must, and you have a duty to help those countries that cannot afford to deal with the problems of climate change themselves. You're saying you want a deal with all the different countries of the world where we're all bound together to cutting carbon emissions in a way that is to the benefit of the whole world. We've never had this before because Kyoto didn't work. If you could get a deal at Copenhagen, where people agreed, A, that there was a long-term target for carbon emission cuts, B, that there was short-range targets that had to be met so this wasn't just abstract; it was people actually making decisions now that would make a difference now, and if you could then find a financing mechanism that meant that the poorest countries that had been hurt by our inability to deal with climate change over many, many years and decades are given special help so that they can move to energy-efficient technologies, and they are in a position financially to be able to afford the long-term investment that is associated with cutting carbon emissions, then you are treating the world equally, by giving consideration to every part of the planet and the needs they have. It doesn't mean that everybody does exactly the same thing, because we've actually got to do more financially to help the poorest countries, but it does mean there is equal consideration for the needs of citizens in a single planet. CA: Yes. And then of course the theory is still that those talks get rent apart by different countries fighting over their own individual interests. GB: Yes, but I think Europe has got a position, which is 27 countries have already come together. I mean, the great difficulty in Europe is if you're at a meeting and 27 people speak, it takes a very, very long time. But we did get an agreement on climate change. America has made its first disposition on this with the bill that President Obama should be congratulated for getting through Congress. Japan has made an announcement. China and India have signed up to the scientific evidence. And now we've got to move them to accept a long-term target, and then short-term targets. But more progress has been made, I think, in the last few weeks than had been made for some years. And I do believe that there is a strong possibility that if we work together, we can get that agreement to Copenhagen. I certainly have been putting forward proposals that would have allowed the poorest parts of the world to feel that we have taken into account their specific needs. And we would help them adapt. And we would help them make the transition to a low-carbon economy. I do think a reform of the international institutions is vital to this. When the IMF was created in the 1940s, it was created with resources that were five percent or so of the world's GDP. The IMF now has limited resources, one percent. It can't really make the difference that ought to be made in a period of crisis. So, we've got to rebuild the world institutions. And that's a big task: persuading all the different countries with the different voting shares in these institutions to do so. There is a story told about the three world leaders of the day getting a chance to get some advice from God. And the story is told that Bill Clinton went to God and he asked when there will be successful climate change and a low-carbon economy. And God shook his head and said, "Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not even in [your] lifetime." And Bill Clinton walked away in tears because he had failed to get what he wanted. And then the story is that Barroso, the president of the European Commission, went to God and he asked, "When will we get a recovery of global growth?" And God said, "Not this year, not in this decade, perhaps not in your lifetime." So Barroso walked away crying and in tears. And then the Secretary-General of the United Nations came up to speak to God and said, "When will our international institutions work?" And God cried. (Laughter) It is very important to recognize that this reform of institutions is the next stage after agreeing upon ourselves that there is a clear ethic upon which we can build. CA: Prime Minister, I think there are many in the audience who are truly appreciative of the efforts you made in terms of the financial mess we got ourselves into. And there are certainly many people in the audience who will be cheering you on as you seek to advance this global ethic. Thank you so much for coming to TED. GB: Well, thank you. (Applause)

The hunt for a supermassive black hole

{0: 'Andrea Ghez is a stargazing detective, tracking the visible and invisible forces lurking in the vastness of interstellar space.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly. So, my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole. I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call "supermassive" black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist. And second, it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment, and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in. So, to begin with, we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole. So, what is a black hole? Well, in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object, because there are only three characteristics that you can describe: the mass, the spin, and the charge. And I'm going to only talk about the mass. So, in that sense, it's a very simple object. But in another sense, it's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe, and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe. But today, the way I want you to understand a black hole, for the proof of a black hole, is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume. So, despite the fact that I'm going to talk to you about an object that's supermassive, and I'm going to get to what that really means in a moment, it has no finite size. So, this is a little tricky. But fortunately there is a finite size that you can see, and that's known as the Schwarzschild radius. And that's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius. This is a virtual radius, not reality; the black hole has no size. So why is it so important? It's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole. That means you, your neighbor, your cellphone, the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the Schwarzschild radius. At that point, what's going to happen? At that point gravity wins. Gravity wins over all other known forces. And the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object. And then it's a black hole. So, if I were to compress the Earth down to the size of a sugar cube, it would become a black hole, because the size of a sugar cube is its Schwarzschild radius. Now, the key here is to figure out what that Schwarzschild radius is. And it turns out that it's actually pretty simple to figure out. It depends only on the mass of the object. Bigger objects have bigger Schwarzschild radii. Smaller objects have smaller Schwarzschild radii. So, if I were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the University of Oxford, it would become a black hole. So, now we know what a Schwarzschild radius is. And it's actually quite a useful concept, because it tells us not only when a black hole will form, but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole. I only need two things. I need to understand the mass of the object I'm claiming is a black hole, and what its Schwarzschild radius is. And since the mass determines the Schwarzschild radius, there is actually only one thing I really need to know. So, my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that's confined to within its Schwarzschild radius. And your job today is to be skeptical. Okay, so, I'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole; I'm going to talk about supermassive black holes. So, I wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is, as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole. An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life. So, if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the Sun, it's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here. And inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the Sun. On an astronomical scale that's a very small black hole. Now, what I want to talk about are the supermassive black holes. And the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies. And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. There are big ones. There are little ones. Almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy. And there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left. And there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy, just to give you a sense of scale. And all the light that we see from a typical galaxy, which is the kind of galaxies that we're seeing here, comes from the light from the stars. So, we see the galaxy because of the star light. Now, there are a few relatively exotic galaxies. I like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world, because they are kind of show offs. And we call them active galactic nuclei. And we call them that because their nucleus, or their center, are very active. So, at the center there, that's actually where most of the starlight comes out from. And yet, what we actually see is light that can't be explained by the starlight. It's way more energetic. In fact, in a few examples it's like the ones that we're seeing here. There are also jets emanating out from the center. Again, a source of energy that's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars. So, what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to. So, you can't see the black hole itself, but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see. So, there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies. But it's a kind of indirect argument. Nonetheless, it's given rise to the notion that maybe it's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes, but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers. And if that's the case — and this is an example of a normal galaxy; what we see is the star light. And if there is a supermassive black hole, what we need to assume is that it's a black hole on a diet. Because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei. If we're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies, the best place to look is in our own galaxy, our Milky Way. And this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the Milky Way. And what we see is a line of stars. And that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened, disk-like structure. And we live in the middle of it, so when we look towards the center, we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy, or line that defines the plane of the galaxy. Now, the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we're ever going to have, because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away. So, we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else. And as you'll see in a moment, the ability to see detail is key to this experiment. So, how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume? Which is the job that I have to show you today. And the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole. Stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun. It's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit. If there were no massive objects these things would go flying off, or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit. So, this is great, because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume. So, if I know how fast it goes around, I know the mass. And if I know the scale of the orbit I know the radius. So, I want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible. Because I want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible. So, this means that I want to see a lot of detail. And that's the reason that for this experiment we've used the world's largest telescope. This is the Keck observatory. It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters, which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court. Now, this is wonderful, because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope, the smaller the detail that we can see. But it turns out these telescopes, or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise. And that is because of the atmosphere. Atmosphere is great for us; it allows us to survive here on Earth. But it's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources. So, to give you a sense of what this is like, it's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream. Looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream, the stream is continuously moving and turbulent, and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream. Very much in the same way, it's very difficult to see astronomical sources, because of the atmosphere that's continuously moving by. So, I've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere, to give us a cleaner view. And that buys us about a factor of 20. And I think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20, you've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot, say your salary, you'd notice, or your kids, you'd notice. And this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use, called adaptive optics. You're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you don't use this technique — in other words, just a picture that shows the stars — and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy, where we think the black hole is. So, without this technology you can't see the stars. With this technology all of a sudden you can see it. This technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you. So, it's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope. Now, in the next few slides I'm just going to focus on that little square there. So, we're only going to look at the stars inside that small square, although we've looked at all of them. So, I want to see how these things have moved. And over the course of this experiment, these stars have moved a tremendous amount. So, we've been doing this experiment for 15 years, and we see the stars go all the way around. Now, most astronomers have a favorite star, and mine today is a star that's labeled up there, SO-2. Absolutely my favorite star in the world. And that's because it goes around in only 15 years. And to give you a sense of how short that is, the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy. Stars that we knew about before, that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible, take 500 years. And this one, this one goes around in a human lifetime. That's kind of profound, in a way. But it's the key to this experiment. The orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius. So, next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy. What we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle. And as you can see, there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle. You can see a lot of stars. So, there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, because you could put a lot of stuff in there. But with this experiment, we've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that's 10,000 times smaller. And because of that, we've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there. To give you a sense of how small that size is, that's the size of our solar system. So, we're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume. Now, truth in advertising. Right? I have told you my job is to get it down to the Schwarzchild radius. And the truth is, I'm not quite there. But we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass. And, in fact, it's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but any in our universe. So, what next? I actually think this is about as good as we're going to do with today's technology, so let's move on with the problem. So, what I want to tell you, very briefly, is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy, now that we know that there is, or at least we believe, that there is a supermassive black hole there. And the fun phase of this experiment is, while we've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy, almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see. And that's the fun. So, let me give you the two examples. You can ask, "What do you expect for the old stars, stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time, they've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole." What you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole. You should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole. Likewise, for the young stars, or in contrast, the young stars, they just should not be there. A black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery. To get a star to form, you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse. And it's a very fragile entity. And what does the big black hole do? It strips that gas cloud apart. It pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart. In fact, we anticipated that star formation shouldn't proceed in that environment. So, you shouldn't see young stars. So, what do we see? Using observations that are not the ones I've shown you today, we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young. The old ones are red. The young ones are blue. And the yellow ones, we don't know yet. So, you can already see the surprise. There is a dearth of old stars. There is an abundance of young stars, so it's the exact opposite of the prediction. So, this is the fun part. And in fact, today, this is what we're trying to figure out, this mystery of how do you get — how do you resolve this contradiction. So, in fact, my graduate students are, at this very moment, today, at the telescope, in Hawaii, making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage, where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars, and so few old stars. To make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away. To do that we'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today. Because, in truth, while I said we're correcting for the Earth's atmosphere, we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced. We do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere, and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest. So this is what we hope to do in the next few years. And on a much longer time scale, what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes, because, remember, bigger is better in astronomy. So, we want to build a 30 meter telescope. And with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy. And we hope to be able to test some of Einstein's theories of general relativity, some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form. So, we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting. So, in conclusion, I'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving, in three dimensions. And I hope, if nothing else, I've convinced you that, one, we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And this means that these things do exist in our universe, and we have to contend with this, we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world. Second, we've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact, and understand, maybe, the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are, and how they work. And last but not least, none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that's been made on the technology front. And we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast, and holds a lot in store for the future. Thanks very much. (Applause)

The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting

{0: 'To promote smart water management, Anupam Mishra works to preserve rural India’s traditional rainwater harvesting techniques.'}

TEDIndia 2009

For emotions, we should not move quickly to the desert. So, first, a small housekeeping announcement: please switch off your proper English check programs installed in your brain. (Applause) So, welcome to the Golden Desert, Indian desert. It receives the least rainfall in the country, lowest rainfall. If you are well-versed with inches, nine inches, centimeters, 16 [centimeters]. The groundwater is 300 feet deep, 100 meters. And in most parts it is saline, not fit for drinking. So, you can't install hand pumps or dig wells, though there is no electricity in most of the villages. But suppose you use the green technology, solar pumps — they are of no use in this area. So, welcome to the Golden Desert. Clouds seldom visit this area. But we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here. There are a number of techniques to harvest rain. This is a new work, it's a new program. But for the desert society this is no program; this is their life. And they harvest rain in many ways. So, this is the first device they use in harvesting rain. It's called kunds; somewhere it is called [unclear]. And you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment. The desert is there, sand dunes, some small field. And this is all big raised platform. You can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment, and there is a slope. Sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms, but here they will care properly. And the water will go where it should go. And then it is 40 feet deep. The waterproofing is done perfectly, better than our city contractors, because not a single drop should go waste in this. They collect 100 thousand liters in one season. And this is pure drinking water. Below the surface there is hard saline water. But now you can have this for year round. It's two houses. We often use a term called bylaws. Because we are used to get written things. But here it is unwritten by law. And people made their house, and the water storage tanks. These raised up platforms just like this stage. In fact they go 15 feet deep, and collect rain water from roof, there is a small pipe, and from their courtyard. It can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon. Another big one, this is of course out of the hardcore desert area. This is near Jaipur. This is called the Jaigarh Fort. And it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season. The age is 400 years. So, since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season. You can calculate the price of that water. It draws water from 15 kilometers of canals. You can see a modern road, hardly 50 years old. It can break sometimes. But this 400 year old canal, which draws water, it is maintained for so many generations. Of course if you want to go inside, the two doors are locked. But they can be opened for TED people. (Laughter) And we request them. You can see person coming up with two canisters of water. And the water level — these are not empty canisters — water level is right up to this. It can envy many municipalities, the color, the taste, the purity of this water. And this is what they call Zero B type of water, because it comes from the clouds, pure distilled water. We stop for a quick commercial break, and then we come back to the traditional systems. The government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the Himalayas. That's why I said that this is a commercial break. (Laughter) But we will come back, once again, to the traditional thing. So, water from 300, 400 kilometers away, soon it become like this. In many portions, water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything. Of course there are some areas where water is reaching, I'm not saying that it is not reaching at all. But the tail end, the Jaisalmer area, you will notice in Bikaner things like this: where the water hyacinth couldn't grow, the sand is flowing in these canals. The bonus is that you can find wildlife around it. (Laughter) We had full-page advertisements, some 30 years, 25 years ago when this canal came. They said that throw away your traditional systems, these new cement tanks will supply you piped water. It's a dream. And it became a dream also. Because soon the water was not able to reach these areas. And people started renovating their own structures. These are all traditional water structures, which we won't be able to explain in such a short time. But you can see that no woman is standing on those. (Laughter) And they are plaiting hair. (Applause) Jaisalmer. This is heart of desert. This town was established 800 years ago. I'm not sure by that time Bombay was there, or Delhi was there, or Chennai was there, or Bangalore was there. So, this was the terminal point for silk route. Well connected, 800 years ago, through Europe. None of us were able to go to Europe, but Jaisalmer was well connected to it. And this is the 16 centimeter area. Such a limited rainfall, and highest colorful life flourished in these areas. You won't find water in this slide. But it is invisible. Somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here. Or, if you want to paint, you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms. But apart from this system, they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town. And what we call private public partnership you can add estate also. So, estate, public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body. And it's a kind of water body for all seasons. You will admire it. Just behold the beauty throughout the year. Whether water level goes up or down, the beauty is there throughout. Another water body, dried up, of course, during the summer period, but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics, with the heart. These statues, marvelous statues, gives you an idea of water table. When this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank, it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in English today "mass communication." This was for mass communication. Everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned, so water will be there for seven months or nine months, or 12 months. And then they will come and worship this pond, pay respect, their gratitude. Another small water body, called the [unclear]. It is difficult to translate in English, especially in my English. But the nearest would be "glory," a reputation. The reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up. In severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up. And perhaps they knew the future also. It was designed some 150 years ago. But perhaps they knew that on sixth, November, 2009, there will be a TED green and blue session, so they painted it like this. (Laughter) (Applause) Dry water body. Children are standing on a very difficult device to explain. This is called kund. We have, in English, surface water and ground water. But this is not ground water. You can draw ground water from any well. But this is no ordinary well. It squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand. And they have dubbed this water as the third one called [unclear]. And there is a gypsum belt running below it. And it was deposited by the great mother Earth, some three million years ago. And where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water. This is the same dry water body. Now, you don't find any kund; they are all submerged. But when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year. This year they have received only six centimeters. Six centimeter of rainfall, and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city, Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Mysore, please come to our area of six centimeters, we can give you water. (Laughter) How they maintain them? There are three things: concept, planning, making the actual thing, and also maintaining them. It is a structure for maintain, for centuries, by generations, without any department, without any funding, So the secret is "[unclear]," respect. Your own thing, not personal property, my property, every time. So, these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area. Don't spit, don't do anything wrong, so that the clean water can be collected. Another pillar, stone pillar on your right side. If you climb these three, six steps you will find something very nice. This was done in 11th century. And you have to go further down. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we can say a thousand words right now, an another thousand words. If the water table goes down, you will find new stairs. If it comes up, some of them will be submerged. So, throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure. Three sides, such steps, on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such TED conferences anytime. (Applause) Excuse me, who built these structures? They are in front of you. The best civil engineers we had, the best planners, the best architects. We can say that because of them, because of their forefathers, India could get the first engineering college in 1847. There were no English medium schools at that time, even no Hindi schools, [unclear] schools. But such people, compelled to the East India Company, which came here for business, a very dirty kind of business ... (Laughter) but not to create the engineering colleges. But because of them, first engineering college was created in a small village, not in the town. The last point, we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert. So, you can find through your Jeep, a camel, and a cart. This tire comes from the airplane. So, look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater, and also create something through a tire from a jet plane, and used in a camel cart. Last picture, it's a tattoo, 2,000-years-old tattoo. They were using it on their body. Tattoo was, at one time, a kind of a blacklisted or con thing, but now it is in thing. (Laughter) (Applause) You can copy this tattoo. I have some posters of this. (Laughter) The center of life is water. These are the beautiful waves. These are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides. These are the trees. And these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives. So, this is the message of desert. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, first of all, I wish I had your eloquence, truly, in any language. (Applause) These artifacts and designs are inspiring. Do you believe that they can be used elsewhere, that the world can learn from this? Or is this just right for this place? Anupam Mishra: No, the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area. So, the ponds, the open bodies, are everywhere, right from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, and in other parts also. And these [unclear], which stored water, there are two type of things. One recharge, and one stores. So, it depends on the terrain. But kund, which uses the gypsum belt, for that you have to go back to your calendar, three million years ago. If it is there it can be done right now. Otherwise, it can't be done. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Thank you so much. (Applause)

The art of puzzles

{0: "Scott Kim designs puzzles in the spirit of MC Escher's art and <i>Tetris</i> -- visually stimulating, thought provoking and suffused with broad appeal."}

EG 2008

For the last 20 years I've been designing puzzles. And I'm here today to give you a little tour, starting from the very first puzzle I designed, through what I'm doing now. I've designed puzzles for books, printed things. I'm the puzzle columnist for Discover Magazine. I've been doing that for about 10 years. I have a monthly puzzle calendar. I do toys. The bulk of my work is in computer games. I did puzzles for "Bejeweled." (Applause) I didn't invent "Bejeweled." I can't take credit for that. So, very first puzzle, sixth grade, my teacher said, "Oh, let's see, that guy, he likes to make stuff. I'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper for the board." I thought this was a great assignment. And so here is what I came up with. I start fiddling with it. I came up with this letter. This is a letter of the alphabet that's been folded just once. The question is, which letter is it if I unfold it? One hint: It's not "L." (Laughter) It could be an "L," of course. So, what else could it be? Yeah, a lot of you got it. Oh yeah. So, clever thing. Now, that was my first puzzle. I got hooked. I created something new, I was very excited because, you know, I'd made crossword puzzles, but that's sort of like filling in somebody else's matrix. This was something really original. I got hooked. I read Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American. Went on, and eventually decided to devote myself, full time, to that. Now, I should pause and say, what do I mean by puzzle? A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer. "Fun to solve," as opposed to everyday problems, which, frankly, are not very well-designed puzzles. You know, they might have a solution. It might take a long time. Nobody wrote down the rules clearly. Who designed this? It's like, you know, life is not a very well-written story so we have to hire writers to make movies. Well, I take everyday problems, and I make puzzles out of them. And "right answer," of course there might be more than one right answer; many puzzles have more than one. But as opposed to a couple other forms of play, toys and games — by toy I mean, something you play with that doesn't have a particular goal. You can create one out of Legos. You know, you can do anything you want. Or competitive games like chess where, well, you're not trying to solve ... You can make a chess puzzle, but the goal really is to beat another player. I consider that puzzles are an art form. They're very ancient. It goes back as long as there is written history. It's a very small form, like a joke, a poem, a magic trick or a song, very compact form. At worst, they're throwaways, they're for amusement. But at best they can reach for something more and create a memorable impression. The progression of my career that you'll see is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact. So, one thing I found early on, when I started doing computer games, is that I could create puzzles that will alter your perception. I'll show you how. Here is a famous one. So, it's two profiles in black, or a white vase in the middle. This is called a figure-ground illusion. The artist M.C. Escher exploited that in some of his wonderful prints. Here we have "Day and Night." Here is what I did with figure and ground. So, here we have "figure" in black. Here we have "figure" in white. And it's all part of the same design. The background to one is the other. Originally I tried to do the words "figure" and "ground." But I couldn't do that, I realized. I changed the problem. It's all "figure." (Laughter) A few other things. Here is my name. And that turns into the title of my first book, "Inversions." These sorts of designs now go by the word "ambigram." I'll show you just a couple others. Here we have the numbers one through 10, the digits zero through nine, actually. Each letter here is one of these digits. Not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense. I like pushing on what an ambigram can mean. Here's the word "mirror." No, it's not the same upside-down. It's the same this way. And a marvelous fellow from the Media Lab who just got appointed head of RISD, is John Maeda. And so I did this for him. It's sort of a visual canon. (Laughter) And recently in Magic magazine I've done a number of ambigrams on magician's names. So here we have Penn and Teller, same upside-down. This appears in my puzzle calendar. Okay, let's go back to the slides. Thank you very much. Now, those are fun to look at. Now how would you do it interactively? For a while I was an interface designer. And so I think a lot about interaction. Well, let's first of all simplify the vases illusion, make the thing on the right. Now, if you could pick up the black vase, it would look like the figure on top. If you could pick up the white area, it would look like the figure on the bottom. Well, you can't do that physically, but on a computer you can do it. Let's switch over to the P.C. And here it is, figure-ground. The goal here is to take the pieces on the left and make them so they look like the shape on the right. And this follows the rules I just said: any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up. But that is also true of any white area. So, here we got the white area in the middle, and you can pick it up. I'll just go one step further. So, here is — here is a couple pieces. Move them together, and now this is an active piece. You can really get inside somebody's perception and have them experience something. It's like the old maxim of "you can tell somebody something and show them, but if they do it they really learn it." Here is another thing you can do. There is a game called Rush Hour. This is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design besides Rubik's cube. So, here we have a crowded parking lot with cars all over the place. The goal is to get the red car out. It's a sliding block puzzle. It's made by the company Think Fun. It's done very well. I love this puzzle. Well, let's play one. Here. So, here is a very simple puzzle. Well, that's too simple, let's add another piece. Okay, so how would you solve this one? Well, move the blue one out of the way. Here, let's make it a little harder. Still pretty easy. Now we'll make it harder, a little harder. Now, this one is a little bit trickier. You know? What do you do here? The first move is going to be what? You're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right. And you can make puzzles like this one that aren't solvable at all. Those four are locked in a pinwheel; you can't get them apart. I wanted to make a sequel. I didn't come up with the original idea. But this is another way I work as an inventor is to create a sequel. I came up with this. This is Railroad Rush Hour. It's the same basic game except I introduced a new piece, a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically. In the other game the cars can only move forward and back. Created a whole bunch of levels for it. Now I'm making it available to schools. And it includes exercises that show you not just how to solve these puzzles, but how to extract the principles that will let you solve mathematical puzzles or problems in science, other areas. So, I'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles as well as just me creating them. Garry Trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist. You know, he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon. In Discover Magazine, I'm an investigative puzzle maker. I got interested in gene sequencing. And I said, "Well, how on Earth can you come up with a sequence of the base pairs in DNA?" Cut up the DNA, you sequence individual pieces, and then you look for overlaps, and you basically match them at the edges. And I said, "This is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces overlap." So, here is what I created for Discover Magazine. And it has to be solvable in a magazine. You know, you can't cut out the pieces and move them around. So, here is the nine pieces. And you're supposed to put them into this grid. And you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge. There is only one solution. It's not that hard. But it takes some persistence. And when you're done, it makes this design, which, if you squint, is the word "helix." So, that's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content, rather than the other way around. Here is a couple more. Here is a physics-based puzzle. Which way will these fall? One of these weighs 50 pounds, 30 pounds and 10 pounds. And depending on which one weighs which amount, they'll fall different directions. And here is a puzzle based on color mixing. I separated this image into cyan, magenta, yellow, black, the basic printing colors, and then mixed up the separations, and you get these peculiar pictures. Which separations were mixed up to make those pictures? Gets you thinking about color. Finally, what I'm doing now. So, ShuffleBrain.com, website you can go visit, I joined up with my wife, Amy-Jo Kim. She could easily be up here giving a talk about her work. So, we're making smart games for social media. I'll explain what that means. We're looking at three trends. This is what's going on in the games industry right now. First of all, you know, for a long time computer games meant things like "Doom," where you're going around shooting things, very violent games, very fast, aimed at teenage boys. Right? That's who plays computer games. Well, guess what? That's changing. "Bejeweled" is a big hit. It was the game that really broke open what's called casual games. And the main players are over 35, and are female. Then recently "Rock Band" has been a big hit. And it's a game you play with other people. It's very physical. It looks nothing like a traditional game. This is what's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming. Now, within that there is some interesting things happening. There is also a trend towards games that are good for you. Why? Well, we aging Boomers, Baby Boomers, we're eating our healthy food, we're exercising. What about our minds? Oh no, our parents are getting Alzheimer's. We better do something. Turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of Alzheimer's. So, we got games like "Brain Age" coming out for the Nintendo DS, huge hit. A lot of people do Sudoku. In fact some doctors prescribe it. And then there is social media, and what's happening on the Internet. Everybody now considers themselves a creator, and not just a viewer. And what does this add up to? Here is what we see coming. It's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle. They're part of your life. They're not necessarily a separate thing. And they are both, something that is good for you, and they're fun. I'm a puzzle guy. My wife is an expert in social media. And we decided to combine our skills. Our first game is called "Photo Grab." The game takes about a minute and 20 seconds. This is your first time playing my game. Okay. Let's see how well we can do. There are three images. And we have 24 seconds each. Where is that? I'll play as fast as I can. But if you can see it, shout out the answer. You get more — Down, okay, yeah where is that? Oh, yeah. There, okay. J-O and — I guess that's that part. We got the bow. That bow helps. That's his hair. You get a lot of figure-ground problems. Yeah, that one is easy. Okay. So, ahhh! Okay on to the next one. Okay, so that's the lens. Anybody? Looks like a black shape. So, where is that? That's the corner of the whole thing. Yeah, I've played this image before, but even when I make up my own puzzles — and you can put your own images in here. And we have people all over the world doing that now. There we are. Visit ShuffleBrain.com if you want to try it yourself. Thank you. (Applause)

A one-man world summit

{0: "One of the UK's sharpest funny men, Rory Bremner exposes the lunacies of modern politics with devilishly clever political satire and spot-on impressions of leaders from around the world."}

TEDGlobal 2009

Chris has been so nice. I don't know how you keep it up, Chris, I really don't. So nice, all week. He's the kind of man you could say to, "Chris, I'm really sorry, I've crashed your car. And it gets worse, I crashed it into your house. Your house has caught fire. And what's more, your wife has just run off with your best friend." And you know that Chris would say, "Thank you." (Laughter) "Thank you for sharing, that's really interesting." (Laughter) "Thank you for taking me to a place that I didn't know existed. Thank you." (Laughter) One of the — (Applause) Thank you for inviting us. One of the things about appearing later on in the TED week is that, gradually, as the days go by, all the other speakers cover most of what you were going to say. (Laughter) Nuclear fusion, I had about 10 minutes on that. Spectroscopy, that was another one. Parallel universes. And so this morning I thought, "Oh well, I'll just do a card trick." (Laughter) That one's gone as well. And today is Emmanuel's day, I think we've agreed that, already, haven't we? Emmanuel? Absolutely. (Applause) I was planning on finishing on a dance ... (Laughter) So, that's going to look pretty shabby now. So, what I thought I'd do is — in honor of Emmanuel — is, what I can do is to launch today the first TED Global auction. If I could start, this is the Enigma decoding machine. (Laughter) Who will start me with $1,000? Anyone? Thank you. Bruno's face, just then, he said, "No, don't go through this. Don't, please don't. Don't go through this. Don't do it." (Laughter) I'm worried. When I first got the invitation, they said somewhere in the thing, they said, "15 minutes to change the world, your moment onstage." 15 minutes to change the world. I don't know about you, it takes me 15 minutes to change a plug. (Laughter) So, the idea of changing the world is really quite an extraordinary one. Well, of course now we know we don't have to change a plug, now we've seen that wonderful demonstration of the wireless electric — fantastic. You know, it inspires us. 300 years ago he'd have been burnt at the stake for that. (Laughter) And now it's an idea. (Laughter) It's great. It's fantastic. But you do meet some fantastic people, people who look at the world in a totally different way. Yesterday, David Deutsch, another one who covered most of what I was going to say. (Laughter) But when you think of the world in that way, it does make going to Starbucks a whole new experience, don't you think? I mean, he must walk in and they will say, "Would you like a macchiato, or a latte, or an Americano, or a cappuccino?" And he'll say, "You're offering me things that are infinitely variable." (Laughter) "How can your coffee be true?" (Laughter) And they will say, "Would you mind if I serve the next customer?" (Laughter) And Elaine Morgan yesterday, wasn't she wonderful? Fantastic. Really good. Her talk about the aquatic ape, and the link, of course, the link between Darwinism and the fact that we are all naked beneath this — we're not hirsute and we can swim rather well. And she said, you know, she's 90. She's running out of time, she said. And she's desperate to find more evidence for the link. And I think, "I'm sitting next to Lewis Pugh." (Laughter) This man has swum around the North Pole, what more evidence do you want? (Laughter) And there he is. (Applause) That's how TED brings these connections together. I wasn't here on Tuesday. I didn't actually see Gordon Brown's job application — um, sorry. (Laughter) I'm so sorry. (Applause) I'm so sorry. No, no. (Applause) No, no, ahh ... (Applause) (As Brown): "Global problems require Scottish solutions." (Laughter) The problem I have is because Gordon Brown, he comes onstage and he looks for all the world like a man who's just taken the head off a bear suit. (As Brown): "Hello, can I tell you what happened in the woods back there? Uh, no." (Laughter) "I'm sorry. I've only got 18 minutes, 18 minutes to talk about saving the world, saving the planet, global institutions. Our work on climate change, I've only got 18 minutes, unfortunately I'm not able to tell you about all the wonderful things we're doing to promote the climate change agenda in Great Britain, like the third runway we're planning at Heathrow Airport ..." (Laughter) "The large coal-fired power station we're building at King's North, and of course the exciting news that only today, only this week, Britain's only manufacturer of wind turbines has been forced to close. No time, unfortunately, to mention those." (Applause) "British jobs for Scottish people ... No." (Laughter) "Christian principles, Christian values. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." (Laughter) "Although to be honest, when I was at Number 11 that was never going to be a problem." (Laughter) (As Tony Blair): "Yeah, alright, come on, eh. Alright Gordon, come on, eh. I just, can I just say a few things about, first about Cherie, because she's a wonderful lady, my wife, with a wonderful smile. That reminds me, I must post that letter." (Laughter) "I just think, you know, what people forget, Gordon and I, we always got on perfectly well. Alright, it was never exactly 'Brokeback Mountain.'" (Laughter) "You know, I wrote to him, just before I left office. I said, 'Can I rely on your support for the next month?' And he wrote back. He said, 'No, you can't.' Which kind of surprised me, because I'd never seen 'can't' spelled that way before." (Laughter) Another thing Gordon could have mentioned in his speech to the Mansion House in 2002 — that was to the building; the people weren't listening. But the people, when talking about the finance industry, he said, "What you as the city of London have done for financial services, we, as a government, hope to do for the economy as a whole." (Laughter) When you think what's happened to financial services, and you see what's happened to the economy, you think, "Well, there is a man who delivers on his promises." (Laughter) But we're in a new world now. We're in a completely new world. This is the first time that I can remember, where if you get a letter from the bank manager about a loan, you don't know if you're borrowing money from him, or if he's borrowing money from you. Am I right? These extraordinary things, Icelandic Internet accounts. Did anyone here have an Icelandic Internet account? Why would you do that? Why would — It's like one step up from replying to one of those emails from Nigeria, isn't it? (Laughter) Asking for your bank details. And, you know, Iceland, it was never going to cut it. It didn't have that kind of collateral. What does it have? It has fish, that's all. That's why the Prime Minister went on television. He said, "This has left us all with a very big haddock." (Laughter) A lot of what I do — I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them. And making sense of the financial crisis is very, very difficult. Luckily, somebody like George Bush was really helpful. He summed it up, really, at a dinner. He was speaking at a dinner, he said, "Wall Street got drunk." (Laughter) "And now it's got a hangover." And that's, you know, that's something — (Applause) And that's something we can relate to. It's certainly something he can relate to. (Laughter) And the other one, of course, is Donald Rumsfeld, who said, "There are the known knowns, the things we know we know. And then you got the known unknowns, the things we know we don't know. And then you got the unknown unknowns, those are the things we don't know we don't know." And being English, when I first heard that I thought, "What a load of cock." And then, you're now, well, actually, that's what this is about. This whole, what Ben Bernanke has said, the chaotic unwinding of the world's financial system, it's about — they don't know, they didn't know what they were doing. In 2006, the head of the American Mortgage Bankers Association said, quote, "As we can clearly see, no seismic occurrence is about to overwhelm the U.S. economy." Now, there is a man on top of his job. (Laughter) And when the crisis was happening, the head of quantitative equities at Lehman Brothers said, "Events which models predicted would happen once every 10,000 years happened every day for three days." So, it's extraordinary. It's a new world that's very, very difficult to make sense of. But we have a new hope. We have a new man. America has now elected its first openly black President. (Laughter) Wonderful news. Not only that, he's left-handed. Have you noticed this? How many people here are left-handed? You see, a lot of the people that I most admire, they're great artists, great designers, great thinkers, they're left-handed. And somebody said to me last night, you know, being left-handed, you have to learn to write without smudging the ink. And somebody was talking about metaphors on Monday. And I thought, what a wonderful metaphor, isn't it? An American President who has to write without smudging the ink. You like that one? As opposed to you could see George Bush, well, what's the metaphor there? I think it would be something out of the aquatic ape thing, wouldn't it? "Well, you know I'm sorry about that. I'm right-handed but I seem to have smudged that ink as well." (Laughter) But, you know, he's gone. Now he's gone. That's eight years of American History, eight minutes of my act, just gone like that. "You know, it's the end of an error [sic]. I happen to believe it was a great error. I know folks said to me they believe it was one of the greatest errors in the history of the United States. But we proved them wrong in Iraq. They said there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There is now." (Laughter) "But I have a message for the suicide bombers, for those people who've blown themselves up." (Laughter) "We're going to find you." (Laughter) "We're going to make sure you don't do it again." (Laughter) But now he's gone, and it's great to see one of the — arguably one of the worst speech makers in American history, now given way to one of the greatest, in Obama. You were there, maybe, on the night of his victory. And he spoke to the crowd in Chicago, he said, "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible ..." I can't do the whole thing because it would take too long, it really would. (Laughter) But you get the picture. And then it goes to the inauguration. And he and the Chief Justice, they trip over each other, they get their words wrong and they screw the thing up. And there is George Bush sitting there going, "Heh heh heh heh ..." (Laughter) "Not so easy is it? Heh heh heh." (Laughter) But the interesting thing is, Gordon Brown was talking about Cicero, who said, people would listen to a speech, they said, "Great speech." And then they'd listen to Demosthenes, and they'd say, "Let's march." And we all want to believe in President Obama. It's rather like that line in the film "As Good As it Gets." Do you remember that film with Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson, and Helen Hunt says to Jack Nicholson, "What do you see in me?" And Jack Nicholson just says, "You make me want to be a better man." And you want a leader who inspires and challenges and makes you want to be a better citizen. Right? But at the moment, it's a Cicero thing. We like what Barack Obama says, but we don't do anything about it. So he comes over to this country, and he says, "We need a big fiscal stimulus." And everyone goes, "Great!" He leaves the country and the French and the Germans go, "No, no, forget about that, absolutely not." Nothing happens. He goes to Strasburg. He says, "We need more boots on the ground in Afghanistan." And everyone goes, "Great idea." He leaves, people go, "No no no, we're not going to do that. 5,000 maximum, and no rockets. No, no, not going to do it." He goes to Prague, he says, "We believe in a nuclear-free world." And it's great to have an American president who can say the word "nuclear," let's just point that out first. Do you remember that? George Bush, "A nu-ca-ler." Sorry, what? "A nu-ca-ler." (Laughter) Could you say "avuncular"? "Avunclear." (Laughter) Thank you very much. But he says, "We want a nuclear-free world." And that day, North Korea, that very day, North Korea is just seeing if it can just get one over Japan — (Laughter) — and land it before ... So, where do we look for inspiration? We've still got Bill Clinton. "Travels the world." (Laughs) "I believe, I believe it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who said ..." (Laughter) "Tell a lie; it was Diana Ross ..." (Laughter) "... who said, reach out and touch ..." (Laughter) "... somebody's gla — hand." (Laughter) "Make this world a better place, if you can. I just think that's important. I really do. And I was hoping Hillary would get to the White House, because she'd have been out of our home for four years. And I, you know." (Laughter) "So, when that didn't work out I had to make a few arrangements, let me tell you." (Laughter) So, there's him. In Britain we have Prince Charles: "And the environment is so important, all we can do. My wife gets fed up with me constantly trying to push emissions up her agenda." (Laughter) Or, any South Africans, we have Mandela to inspire. Mandela, the great man Mandela. He's been honored with a statue now. The previous highest honor he had in Britain was a visit from the team from Ground Force, a gardening program. "So, Nelson, how would you like a nice water feature?" "Ahh, listen to me Mr. Titchmarsh." (Laughter) "I was held in prison for nearly 30 years on an island in the middle of the ocean. Why would I need a bloody water feature?" (Laughter) Very quickly: I wasn't quite sure how to end this talk and then yesterday that man came up with a wonderful quote from the "Japanese Essays on Idleness" which said it's nice to have something which is unfinished because it implies there is still room for growth. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

The fight against sex slavery

{0: 'Sunitha Krishnan is galvanizing India’s battle against sexual slavery by uniting government, corporations and NGOs to end human trafficking.'}

TEDIndia 2009

I'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation, the third-largest organized crime, a $10 billion industry. I'm talking to you about modern-day slavery. I'd like to tell you the story of these three children, Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali. Pranitha's mother was a woman in prostitution, a prostituted person. She got infected with HIV, and towards the end of her life, when she was in the final stages of AIDS, she could not prostitute, so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker. By the time we got the information, we reached there, Pranitha was already raped by three men. Shaheen's background I don't even know. We found her in a railway track, raped by many, many men, I don't know many. But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body. And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body. We still don't know who her parents are, who she is. All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally. Anjali's father, a drunkard, sold his child for pornography. You're seeing here images of three years, four-year-olds, and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. In this country, and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of adoption. They are sold in the name of organ trade. They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything. I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation. And I tell you stories from there. My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager. I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men. I don't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness. I never felt like a victim, then or now. But what lingered from then till now — I am 40 today — is this huge outrageous anger. Two years, I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated, because I was a victim. And that's what we do to all traffic survivors. We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim. Right from the age of 15, when I started looking around me, I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices, but have absolutely no respite, because we don't allow them to come in. Where does their journey begin? Most of them come from very optionless families, not just poor. You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked. I had this I.S. officer's daughter, who is 14 years old, studying in ninth standard, who was raped chatting with one individual, and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine, who was trafficked. I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families, and children from well-to-do families, who are getting trafficked. These people are deceived, forced. 99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution. Some pay the price for it. They're killed; we don't even hear about them. They are voiceless, [unclear], nameless people. But the rest, who succumb into it, go through everyday torture. Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends, or who want to have a family with you. These are men who buy you for an hour, for a day, and use you, throw you. Each of the girls that I have rescued — I have rescued more than 3,200 girls — each of them tell me one story in common ... (Applause) one story about one man, at least, putting chili powder in her vagina, one man taking a cigarette and burning her, one man whipping her. We are living among those men: they're our brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, all around us. And we are silent about them. We think it is easy money. We think it is shortcut. We think the person likes to do what she's doing. But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, you name it, substance abuse, drugs, everything under the sun. And one day she gives up on you and me, because we have no options for her. And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation. She believes, "Yes, this is it, this is what my destiny is about." And this is normal, to get raped by 100 men a day. And it's abnormal to live in a shelter. It's abnormal to get rehabilitated. It's in that context that I work. It's in that context that I rescue children. I've rescued children as young as three years, and I've rescued women as old as 40 years. When I rescued them, one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin. Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected. One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive. And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain. And for me, I was my greatest experience. Understanding my own self, understanding my own pain, my own isolation, was my greatest teacher. Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential. You see a girl here who is trained as a welder. She works for a very big company, a workshop in Hyderabad, making furnitures. She earns around 12,000 rupees. She is an illiterate girl, trained, skilled as a welder. Why welding and why not computers? We felt, one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage. They did not have any pardas inside their body, hijabs inside themselves; they've crossed the barrier of it. And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world, very easily, and not feel very shy about it. We have trained girls as carpenters, as masons, as security guards, as cab drivers. And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field, gaining confidence, restoring dignity, and building hopes in their own lives. These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction, as masons, full-time masons. What has been my challenge? My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up. I've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life. I can't hear from my right ear. I've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue. My biggest challenge is society. It's you and me. My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own. A very supportive friend of mine, a well-wisher of mine, used to give me every month, 2,000 rupees for vegetables. When her mother fell sick she said, "Sunitha, you have so much of contacts. Can you get somebody in my house to work, so that she can look after my mother?" And there is a long pause. And then she says, "Not one of our girls." It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It's not nice for our children to study with their children. There it ends. That's my biggest challenge. If I'm here today, I'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan. I'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking. They need your compassion. They need your empathy. They need, much more than anything else, your acceptance. Many times when I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don't tell me hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem. Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem? And that's what I'm here for, asking for your support, demanding for your support, requesting for your support. Can you break your culture of silence? Can you speak to at least two persons about this story? Tell them this story. Convince them to tell the story to another two persons. I'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings, or Medha Patkars, or something like that. I'm asking you, in your limited world, can you open your minds? Can you open your hearts? Can you just encompass these people too? Because they are also a part of us. They are also part of this world. I'm asking you, for these children, whose faces you see, they're no more. They died of AIDS last year. I'm asking you to help them, accept as human beings — not as philanthropy, not as charity, but as human beings who deserve all our support. I'm asking you this because no child, no human being, deserves what these children have gone through. Thank you. (Applause)

How low-cost eye care can be world-class

{0: 'Thulasiraj Ravilla is the executive director of the Lions Aravind Institute of Community Ophthalmology, helping eye-care hospitals around the world build capacity to prevent blindness. '}

TEDIndia 2009

Good morning. I've come here to share with you an experiment of how to get rid of one form of human suffering. It really is a story of Dr. Venkataswamy. His mission and his message is about the Aravind Eye Care System. I think first it's important for us to recognize what it is to be blind. (Music) Woman: Everywhere I went looking for work, they said no, what use do we have for a blind woman? I couldn't thread a needle or see the lice in my hair. If an ant fell into my rice, I couldn't see that either. Thulasiraj Ravilla: Becoming blind is a big part of it, but I think it also deprives the person of their livelihood, their dignity, their independence, and their status in the family. So she is just one amongst the millions who are blind. And the irony is that they don't need to be. A simple, well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions, and something even simpler, a pair of glasses, can make millions more see. If we add to that the many of us here now who are more productive because they have a pair of glasses, then almost one in five Indians will require eye care, a staggering 200 million people. Today, we're reaching not even 10 percent of them. So this is the context in which Aravind came into existence about 30 years back as a post-retirement project of Dr. V. He started this with no money. He had to mortgage all his life savings to make a bank loan. And over time, we have grown into a network of five hospitals, predominately in the state of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and then we added several, what we call Vision Centers as a hub-and-spoke model. And then more recently we started managing hospitals in other parts of the country and also setting up hospitals in other parts of the world as well. The last three decades, we have done about three-and-a-half million surgeries, a vast majority of them for the poor people. Now, each year we perform about 300,000 surgeries. A typical day at Aravind, we would do about a thousand surgeries, maybe see about 6,000 patients, send out teams into the villages to examine, bring back patients, lots of telemedicine consultations, and, on top of that, do a lot of training, both for doctors and technicians who will become the future staff of Aravind. And then doing this day-in and day-out, and doing it well, requires a lot of inspiration and a lot of hard work. And I think this was possible thanks to the building blocks put in place by Dr. V., a value system, an efficient delivery process, and fostering the culture of innovation. (Music) Dr. V: I used to sit with the ordinary village man because I am from a village, and suddenly you turn around and seem to be in contact with his inner being, you seem to be one with him. Here is a soul which has got all the simplicity of confidence. Doctor, whatever you say, I accept it. An implicit faith in you and then you respond to it. Here is an old lady who has got so much faith in me, I must do my best for her. When we grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify ourselves with all that is in the world, so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing. (Applause) This helped us build a very ethical and very highly patient-centric organization and systems that support it. But on a practical level, you also have to deliver services efficiently, and, odd as it may seem, the inspiration came from McDonald's. Dr. V: See, McDonald's' concept is simple. They feel they can train people all over the world, irrespective of different religions, cultures, all those things, to produce a product in the same way and deliver it in the same manner in hundreds of places. Larry Brilliant: He kept talking about McDonalds and hamburgers, and none of it made any sense to us. He wanted to create a franchise, a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of McDonald's. Dr. V: Supposing I'm able to produce eye care, techniques, methods, all in the same way, and make it available in every corner of the world. The problem of blindness is gone. TR: If you think about it, I think the eyeball is the same, as American or African, the problem is the same, the treatment is the same. And yet, why should there be so much variation in quality and in service, and that was the fundamental principle that we followed when we designed the delivery systems. And, of course, the challenge was that it's a huge problem, we are talking of millions of people, very little resource to deal with it, and then lots of logistics and affordability issues. And then so, one had to constantly innovate. And one of the early innovations, which still continues, is to create ownership in the community to the problem, and then engage with them as a partner, and here is one such event. Here a community camp just organized by the community themselves, where they find a place, organize volunteers, and then we'll do our part. You know, check their vision, and then you have doctors who you find out what the problem is and then determine what further testing should be done, and then those tests are done by technicians who check for glasses, or check for glaucoma. And then, with all these results, the doctor makes a final diagnosis, and then prescribes a line of treatment, and if they need a pair of glasses, they are available right there at the camp site, usually under a tree. But they get glasses in the frames of their choice, and that's very important because I think glasses, in addition to helping people see, is also a fashion statement, and they're willing to pay for it. So they get it in about 20 minutes and those who require surgery, are counseled, and then there are buses waiting, which will transport them to the base hospital. And if it was not for this kind of logistics and support, many people like this would probably never get services, and certainly not when they most need it. They receive surgery the following day, and then they will stay for a day or two, and then they are put back on the buses to be taken back to where they came from, and where their families will be waiting to take them back home. (Applause) And this happens several thousand times each year. It may sound impressive that we're seeing lots of patients, very efficient process, but we looked at, are we solving the problem? We did a study, a scientifically designed process, and then, to our dismay, we found this was only reaching seven percent of those in need, and we're not adequately addressing more, bigger problems. So we had to do something different, so we set up what we call primary eye care centers, vision centers. These are truly paperless offices with completely electronic medical records and so on. They receive comprehensive eye exams. We kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera, and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor. The effect of this has been that, within the first year, we really had a 40 percent penetration in the market that it served, which is over 50,000 people. And the second year went up to 75 percent. So I think we have a process by which we can really penetrate into the market and reach everyone who needs it, and in this process of using technology, make sure that most don't need to come to the base hospital. And how much will they pay for this? We fixed the pricing, taking into account what they would save in bus fare in coming to a city, so they pay about 20 rupees, and that's good for three consultations. (Applause) The other challenge was, how do you give high-tech or more advanced treatment and care? We designed a van with a VSAT, which sends out images of patients to the base hospital where it is diagnosed, and then as the patient is waiting, the report goes back to the patient, it gets printed out, the patient gets it, and then gets a consultation about what they should be doing — I mean, go see a doctor or come back after six months, and then this happens as a way of bridging the technology competence. So the impact of all this has been essentially one of growing the market, because it focused on the non-customer, and then by reaching the unreached, we're able to significantly grow the market. The other aspect is how do you deal with this efficiently when you have very few ophthalmologists? So what is in this video is a surgeon operating, and then you see on the other side, another patient is getting ready. So, as they finish the surgery, they just swing the microscope over, the tables are placed so that their distance is just right, and then we need to do this, because, by doing this kind of process, we're able to more than quadruple the productivity of the surgeon. And then to support the surgeon, we require a certain workforce. And then we focused on village girls that we recruited, and then they really are the backbone of the organization. They do almost all of the skill-based routine tasks. They do one thing at a time. They do it extremely well. With the result we have very high productivity, very high quality at very, very low cost. So, putting all this together, what really happened was the productivity of our staff was significantly higher than anyone else. (Applause) This is a very busy table, but what this really is conveying is that, when it comes to quality, we have put in very good quality-assurance systems. As a result, our complications are significantly lower than what has been reported in the United Kingdom, and you don't see those kind of numbers very often. (Applause) So the final part of the puzzle is, how do you make all this work financially, especially when the people can't pay for it? So what we did was, we gave away a lot of it for free, and then those who pay, I mean, they paid local market rates, nothing more, and often much less. And we were helped by the market inefficiency. I think that has been a big savior, even now. And, of course, one needs the mindset to be wanting to give away what you have as a surplus. The result has been, over the years, the expenditure has increased with volumes. The revenues increase at a higher level, giving us a healthy margin while you're treating a large number of people for free. I think in absolute terms, last year we earned about 20-odd million dollars, spent about 13 million, with over a 40 percent EBITA. (Applause) But this really requires going beyond what we do, or what we have done, if you really want to achieve solving this problem of blindness. And what we did was a couple of very counter-intuitive things. We created competition for ourselves, and then we made eye care affordable by making low-cost consumables. We proactively and systematically promoted these practices to many hospitals in India, many in our own backyards and then in other parts of the world as well. The impact of this has been that these hospitals, in the second year after our consultation, are double their output and then achieve financial recovery as well. The other part was how do you address this increase in cost of technology? There was a time when we failed to negotiate the [intra-ocular lens] prices to be at affordable levels, so we set up a manufacturing unit. And then, over time, we were able to bring down the cost significantly to about two percent of what it used to be when we started out. Today, we believe we have about seven percent of the global market, and they're used in about 120-odd countries. To conclude, I mean, what we do, does it have a broader relevance, or is it just India or developing countries? So to address this, we studied UK versus Aravind. What it shows is that we do roughly about 60 percent of the volume of what the UK does, near a half-million surgeries as a whole country. And we do about 300,000. And then we train about 50 ophthalmologists against the 70 trained by them, comparable quality, both in training and in patient care. So we're really comparing apples to apples. We looked at cost. (Laughter) (Applause) So, I think it is simple to say just because the U.K. isn't India the difference is happening. I think there is more to it. I mean, I think one has to look at other aspects as well. Maybe there is — the solution to the cost could be in productivity, maybe in efficiency, in the clinical process, or in how much they pay for the lenses or consumables, or regulations, their defensive practice. So, I think decoding this can probably bring answers to most developed countries including the U.S., and maybe Obama's ratings can go up again. (Laughter) Another insight, which, again, I want to leave with you, in conditions where the problem is very large, which cuts across all economic strata, where we have a good solution, I think the process I described, you know, productivity, quality, patient-centered care, can give an answer, and there are many which fit this paradigm. You take dentistry, hearing aid, maternity and so on. There are many where this paradigm can now play, but I think probably one of the most challenging things is on the softer side. Now, how do you create compassion? Now, how do you make people own the problem, want to do something about it? There are a bit harder issues. And I'm sure people in this crowd can probably find the solutions to these. So I want to end my talk leaving this thought and challenge to you. Dr. V: When you grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing. TR: Thank you very much. (Applause)

The art of the interview

{0: 'Marc Pachter has spent his career curating and creating intimate portraits of the lives of others. '}

EG 2008

The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did. I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview. And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why. Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me. And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it — and the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited. So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough. But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait. Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we had an hour conversation about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?" And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that." And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own." I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out. So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s. In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force — I guess that's the way I think about it — filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up — by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him. But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman. I didn't know who she was, and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?" And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did." And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it." And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk. So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest, because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them. The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer. The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter." Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you. But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't — and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews — tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place. I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people. There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called "The Women." She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview — I did the living self-portrait with her — there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence. And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation. We were on the stage and then — by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there — any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing. And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question — I didn't know how I was going to get out of it — I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah," she said, "Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress." But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage." And then she turned to me and said, "And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?" Just withering in her contempt. And I said, "I'm learning." (Laughter) And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like. I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died — she had, toward the end, a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party. And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly. Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?" And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "What was your childhood like?" And I said — these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate — and I said, "My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny." (Laughter) And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed? Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints. One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?" And he said, "Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters." So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years. And I asked him one question. I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?" And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "Well ..." — I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so." He said, "You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit." And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that." He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation." And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest." And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow. But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but I promise you it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma," transforming the American theater. An amazing woman. At the time that I proposed to her that — by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary — but proposed to her that she come on. She said, "Come to my apartment." She lived in New York. "Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed." And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but — I speak of the life force — her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion. And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to." And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series. She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?" And the audience just — you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned — here she was, in this broken body — and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "And then puberty hit." And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life. It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family. Thank you very much.

Pop culture in the Arab world

{0: 'Shereen El Feki works and writes on sexuality and social change in the Arab world.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

Hello, everyone. Because this is my first time at TED, I've decided to bring along an old friend to help break the ice a bit. Yes. That's right. This is Barbie. She's 50 years old. And she's looking as young as ever. (Laughter) But I'd also like to introduce you to what may be an unfamiliar face. This is Fulla. Fulla is the Arab world's answer to Barbie. Now, according to proponents of the clash of civilizations, Barbie and Fulla occupy these completely separate spheres. They have different interests. They have divergent values. And should they ever come in contact ... well, I've got to tell you, it's just not going to be pretty. My experience, however, in the Islamic world is very different. Where I work, in the Arab region, people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western, nor are they traditionally Islamic. I want to show you two examples. The first is 4Shbab. It means "for youth" and it's a new Arab TV channel. (Video): Video clips from across the globe. The USA. ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone, if Allah is by my side ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ ♫ Everything will be all right ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ The Arab world. (Music) ♫ She was preserved by modesty of the religion ♫ ♫ She was adorned by the light of the Quran ♫ Shereen El Feki: 4Shbab has been dubbed Islamic MTV. Its creator, who is an Egyptian TV producer called Ahmed Abu Haïba, wants young people to be inspired by Islam to lead better lives. He reckons the best way to get that message across is to use the enormously popular medium of music videos. 4Shbab was set up as an alternative to existing Arab music channels. And they look something like this. (Music) That, by the way is Haifa Wehbe. She's a Lebanese pop star and pan-Arab pin-up girl. In the world of 4Shbab, it's not about bump and grind. But it's not about fire and brimstone either. Its videos are intended to show a kinder, gentler face of Islam, for young people to deal with life's challenges. Now, my second example is for a slightly younger crowd. And it's called "The 99." Now, these are the world's first Islamic superheroes. They were created by a Kuwaiti psychologist called Naif Al Mutawa. And his desire is to rescue Islam from images of intolerance, all in a child-friendly format. "The 99." The characters are meant to embody the 99 attributes of Allah: justice, wisdom, mercy, among others. So, for example, there is the character of Noora. She is meant to have the power to look inside people and see the good and bad in everyone. Another character called Jami has the ability to create fantastic inventions. Now, "The 99" is not just a comic book. It's now a theme park. There is an animated series in the works. And by this time next year, the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman will have joined forces with "The 99" to beat injustice wherever they find it. "The 99" and 4Shbab are just two of many examples of this sort of Islamic cross-cultural hybridization. We're not talking here about a clash of civilizations. Nor is it some sort of indistinguishable mash. I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations, in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined. Now, while 4Shbab and "The 99" may look new and shiny, there is actually a very long tradition of this. Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations both ancient and modern. After all, it's the Quran which encourages us to do this: "We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another." And to my mind, those are pretty wise words, no matter what your creed. Thank you. (Applause)

The intricate economics of terrorism

{0: 'She made her name following the dollars in terrorist networks, but now Loretta Napoleoni is on the trail of something far more sinister -- the gray zone where crime and unregulated credit meet. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

I'm going to show you how terrorism actually interacts with our daily life. 15 years ago I received a phone call from a friend. At the time he was looking after the rights of political prisoners in Italian jails. He asked me if I wanted to interview the Red Brigades. Now, as many of you may remember, the Red Brigades was a terrorist, Marxist organization which was very active in Italy from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. As part of their strategy the Red Brigades never spoke with anybody, not even with their lawyers. They sat in silence through their trails, waving occasionally at family and friends. In 1993 they declared the end of the armed struggle. And they drew a list of people with whom they would talk, and tell their story. And I was one of those people. When I asked my friend why the Red Brigades want to talk to me, he said that the female members of the organization had actually supported my name. In particular, one person had put it forward. She was my childhood friend. She had joined the Red Brigades and became a leader of the organization. Naturally, I didn't know that until the day she was arrested. In fact, I read it in the newspaper. At the time of the phone call I just had a baby, I successfully completed a management buyout to the company I was working with, and the last thing I wanted to do was to go back home and touring the high-security prisons. But this is exactly what I did because I wanted to know what had turned my best friend into a terrorist, and why she'd never tried to recruit me. (Laughter) (Applause) So, this is exactly what I did. Now, I found the answer very quickly. I actually had failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist. The center committee of the Red Brigades had judged me too single-minded and too opinionated to become a good terrorist. My friend, on the other hand, she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders. She also embraced violence. Because she believed that the only way to unblock what, at the time, was known as a blocked democracy, Italy, a country run by the same party for 35 years was the arms struggle. At the same time, while I was interviewing the Red Brigades, I also discovered that their life was not ruled by politics or ideology, but actually was ruled by economics. They were constantly short of cash. They were constantly searching for cash. Now, contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business. I'll give you an idea. In the 1970s, the turnover of the Red Brigades on a yearly basis was seven million dollars. This is roughly between 100 and 150 million, today. Now, you know, if you live underground it's really hard to produce this amount of money. But this also explains why, when I was interviewing the Red Brigades, and then, later on, other arms organizations, including members of al-Zarqawi group in the Middle East, everybody was extremely reluctant to talk about ideology, or politics. Because they had no idea. The political vision of a terrorist organization is decided by the leadership, which, generally, is never more than five to seven people. All the others do, day in and day out, is search for money. Once, for example, I was interviewing this part-timer from the Red Brigades. It was a psychiatrist. He loved sailing. He was a really keen sailor. And he had this beautiful boat. And he told me that the best time of his life was when he was a member of the Red Brigades and he went sailing, every summer, back and forth from Lebanon, where he would pick up Soviet weapons from the PLO, and then carry them all the way to Sardinia where the other arms organization from Europe would go and take their share of the arms. For that service the Red Brigades were actually paid a fee, which went to fund their organization. So, because I am a trained economist and I think in economic terms, all of the sudden I thought, maybe there is something here. Maybe there is a link, a commercial link, between one organization and another one. But it was only when I interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the Red Brigades, the man who kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, Italian former prime minister, that I finally realized that terrorism is actually business. I was having lunch with him in a high-security prison in Italy. And as we were eating, I had the distinct feeling that I was back in the city of London, having lunch with a fellow banker or an economist. This guy thought in the same way I did. So, I decided that I wanted to investigate the economics of terrorism. Naturally, nobody wanted to fund my research. In fact, I think many people thought that I was a bit crazy. You know, that woman that goes around to foundations asking for money, thinking about the economics of terrorism. So, in the end, I took a decision that, in retrospect, did change my life. I sold my company, and funded the research myself. And what I discovered is this parallel reality, another international economic system, which runs parallel to our own, which has been created by arms organizations since the end of World War II. And what is even more shocking is that this system has followed, step by step, the evolution of our own system, of our Western capitalism. And there are three main stages. The first one is the state sponsor of terrorism. The second one is the privatization of terrorism. And the third, of course, is the globalization of terrorism. So, state sponsor of terrorism, feature of the Cold War. This is when the two superpowers were fighting a war by proxy, along the periphery of the sphere of influence, fully funding arms organizations. A mix of legal and illegal activities is used. So, the link between crime and terror is established very early on. And here is the best example, the Contras in Nicaragua, created by the CIA, legally funded by the U.S. Congress, illegally funded by the Reagan administration via covert operation, for example, the Iran-Contra Affair. Then comes the late 1970s, early '80s, and some groups successfully carry out the privatization of terrorism. So, they gain independence from the sponsor, and start funding themselves. Now, again we see a mix of legal and illegal activities. So, Arafat used to get a percentage of the smuggling of hashish from Bekáa Valley, which is the valley between Lebanon and Syria. And the IRA, which control the private transportation system in Northern Ireland, did exactly the same thing. So, every single time that somebody got into a taxi in Belfast without knowing, actually, was funding the IRA. But the great change came, of course, with globalization and deregulation. This is when arms organization were able to link up, also financially, with each other. But above all, they started to do serious business with the world of crime. And together they money-laundered their dirty business through the same channel. This is when we see the birth of the transnational arms organization Al Qaeda. This is an organization that can raise money across border. But also that is able to carry out attacks in more than one country. Now, deregulation also brought back rogue economics. So what is rogue economics? Rogue economics is a force which is constantly lurking in the background of history. It comes back at times of great transformation, globalization being one of those transformations. It is at this times in which politics actually loses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force working against us. It has happened before in history. It has happened with the fall of the Roman Empire. It has happened with Industrial Revolution. And it actually happened again, with the fall of the Berlin wall. Now, I calculated how big was this international economic system composed by crime, terror, and illegal economy, before 9-11. And it is a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars. It is trillions, it's not billions. This is about twice the GDP of the United Kingdom, soon will be more, considering where this country is going. (Laughter) Now, until 9-11, the bulk of all this money flew into the U.S. economy because the bulk of the money was denominated in U.S. dollars and the money laundering was taking place inside the United States. The entry point, of course, of most of this money were the off-shore facilities. So, this was a vital injection of cash into the U.S. economy. Now, when I went to look at the figures of the U.S. money supply, the U.S. money supply is the amount of dollars that the Federal Reserve prints every year in order to satisfy the increase in the demand for dollars, which, of course, reflects the growth of the economy. So, when I went to look at those figures, I noted that since the late 1960s a growing number of these dollars was actually leaving the United States, never to come back. These were money taken out in suitcases or in containers, in cash of course. These were money taken out by criminals and money launderers. These were money taken out to fund the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. So, you see, what is the relationship? The United States actually is a country that is the reserve currency of the world. What does it mean? That means that it has a privilege that other countries do not have. It can borrow against the total amount of dollars in circulation in the world. This privilege is called seigniorage. No other country can do that. All the other countries, for example the United Kingdom, can borrow only against the amount of money in circulation inside its own borders. So, here is the implication of the relationship between the worlds of crime, terror, and illegal economy, and our economy. The U.S. in the 1990s was borrowing against the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. This is how close we are with this world. Now, this situation changed, of course, after 9-11, because George Bush launched the War on Terror. Part of the War on Terror was the introduction of the Patriot Act. Now, many of you know that the Patriot Act is a legislation that greatly reduces the liberties of Americans in order to protect them against terrorism. But there is a section of the Patriot Act which refers specifically to finance. And it is, in fact, an anti-money-laundering legislation. What the Patriot Act did was to prohibit U.S. bank, and U.S.-registered foreign banks from doing any businesses with off-shore facilities. It closed that door between the money laundering in dollars, and the U.S. economy. It also gave the U.S. monetary authorities the right to monitor any dollar transaction taking place anywhere in the world. Now, you can imagine what was the reaction of the international finance and banking. All the bankers said to their clients, "Get out of the dollars and go and invest somewhere else." Now, the Euro was a newly born currency of great opportunity for business, and, of course, for investment. And this is what people did. Nobody wants the U.S. monetary authority to check their relationship, to monitor their relationship with their clientele. The same thing happened, of course, in the world of crime and terror. People simply moved their money-laundering activities away from the United States into Europe. Why did this happen? This happened because the Patriot Act was a unilateral legislation. It was introduced only in the United States. And it was introduced only for the U.S. dollars. In Europe, a similar legislation was not introduced. So, within six months Europe became the epicenter of the money-laundering activities of the world. So, this is how incredible are the relationship between the world of crime and the world of terror, and our own life. So, why did I tell you this story? I told you this story because you must understand that there is a world that goes well beyond the headlines of the newspapers, including the personal relationship that you have with friends and family. You got to question everything that is told to you, including what I just told you today. (Laughter) This is the only way for you to step into the dark side, and have a look at it. And believe me, it's going to be scary. It's going to be frightful, but it's going to enlighten you. And, above all, it's not going to be boring. (Laughter) (Applause)

How to make a splash in social media

{0: 'Alexis Ohanian is the co-founder an executive chairman of Reddit, a social-voting news website with geek allegiances, a small-town feel and a penchant for lighting up the memes your friends IM you about next week.'}

TEDIndia 2009

There are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money. In fact, they make their living on this stuff. I'm going to try to save you all the time and money and go through it in the next three minutes, so bear with me. Started a website in 2005 with a few friends, called Reddit.com. It's what you'd call a social news website; basically, the democratic front page of the best stuff on the web. You find some interesting content — say, a TED Talk — submit it to Reddit, and a community of your peers votes up if they like it, down if they don't. That creates the front page. It's always rising, falling; a half million people visit every day. But this isn't about Reddit. It's about discovering new things that pop up on the web. In the last four years, we've seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends get born right on our front page. This isn't about Reddit itself, it's actually about humpback whales. Well, technically, it's about Greenpeace, an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government's whaling campaign. The whales were getting killed; they wanted to put an end to it. One of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of the whales. But to personify the movement, they wanted to name it. So in true web fashion, they put together a poll, where they had a bunch of very erudite, very thoughtful, cultured names. I believe this is the Farsi word for "immortal." I think this means "divine power of the ocean" in a Polynesian language. And then there was this: "Mister Splashy Pants." (Laughter) And this was a special name. Mister Pants, or "Splashy" to his friends, was very popular on the Internet. In fact, someone on Reddit thought, "What a great thing, we should all vote this up." And Redditors responded and all agreed. So the voting started. We got behind it ourselves; we changed our logo for the day, from the alien to Splashy, to help the cause. And it wasn't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying, "We love Splashy Pants!" So it went from about five percent, which was when this meme started, to 70 percent at the end of voting. Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. Just kidding — Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it, because they wanted one of the more thoughtful names to win. They said, "No, just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting." Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy. (Laughter) And the Reddit community — really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. Facebook groups were created. Facebook applications were created. The idea was, "Vote your conscience, vote for Mister Splashy Pants." People were putting up signs in the real world about this whale. (Laughter) This was the final vote: 78 percent of the votes. To give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in three. There was a clear lesson: the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants. Which is obvious. It's a great name. Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, "Mister Splashy Pants." (Laughter) I think that's what helped drive this. What was cool were the repercussions. Greenpeace created an entire marketing campaign around it — Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins, an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy. But even more important was that they accomplished their mission. The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition. Mission accomplished: Greenpeace was thrilled, the whales were happy — that's a quote. (Laughter) And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. A few, certainly, but we're talking about a lot of people, really interested and caught up in this meme. Greenpeace came back to the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. But this wasn't really altruism; just interest in doing something cool. This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. The Internet provides a level playing field. Your link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. With a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter your budget. That is, as long as you can keep net neutrality in place. Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. There are so many publishing tools available, it only takes a few minutes to produce something. and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well. If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could ultimately achieve your goal. That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. But no longer is the message coming from just the top down. If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control. Thank you. (Applause)

Photographing the hidden story

{0: 'As a photographer and filmmaker, Ryan Lobo uses his exquisite lens to capture humanity and nature at their most open and vulnerable moments.'}

TEDIndia 2009

My name is Ryan Lobo, and I've been involved in the documentary filmmaking business all over the world for the last 10 years. During the process of making these films I found myself taking photographs, often much to the annoyance of the video cameramen. I found this photography of mine almost compulsive. And at the end of a shoot, I would sometimes feel that I had photographs that told a better story than a sometimes-sensational documentary. I felt, when I had my photographs, that I was holding on to something true, regardless of agendas or politics. In 2007, I traveled to three war zones. I traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. And over there I experienced other people's suffering, up close and personal, immersed myself in some rather intense and emotional stories, and at times I experienced great fear for my own life. As always, I would return to Bangalore, and often to animated discussions at friend's homes, where we would discuss various issues while they complained bitterly about the new pub timings, where a drink often cost more than what they'd paid their 14-year-old maid. I would feel very isolated during these discussions. But at the same time, I questioned myself and my own integrity and purpose in storytelling. And I decided that I had compromised, just like my friends in those discussions, where we told stories in contexts we made excuses for, rather than taking responsibility for. I won't go into details about what led to a decision I made, but let's just say it involved alcohol, cigarettes, other substances and a woman. (Laughter) I basically decided that it was I, not the camera or the network, or anything that lay outside myself, that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning. In my life, when I tried to achieve things like success or recognition, they eluded me. Paradoxically, when I let go of these objectives, and worked from a place of compassion and purpose, looking for excellence, rather than the results of it, everything arrived on its own, including fulfillment. Photography transcended culture, including my own. And it is, for me, a language which expressed the intangible, and gives voice to people and stories without. I invite you into three recent stories of mine, which are about this way of looking, if you will, which I believe exemplify the tenets of what I like to call compassion in storytelling. In 2007 I went to Liberia, where a group of my friends and I did an independent, self-funded film, still in progress, on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named General Butt Naked. His real name is Joshua, and he's pictured here in a cell where he once used to torture and murder people, including children. Joshua claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during Liberia's civil war. He got his name from fighting stark naked. And he is probably the most prolific mass murderer alive on Earth today. This woman witnessed the General murdering her brother. Joshua commanded his child-soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes, and enforced his command with great brutality. Today many of these children are addicted to drugs like heroin, and they are destitute, like these young men in the image. How do you live with yourself if you know you've committed horrific crimes? Today the General is a baptized Christian evangelist. And he's on a mission. We accompanied Joshua, as he walked the Earth, visiting villages where he had once killed and raped. He seeked forgiveness, and he claims to endeavor to improve the lives of his child-soldiers. During this expedition I expected him to be killed outright, and us as well. But what I saw opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness which I never thought possible. In the midst of incredible poverty and loss, people who had nothing absolved a man who had taken everything from them. He begs for forgiveness, and receives it from the same woman whose brother he murdered. Senegalese, the young man seated on the wheelchair here, was once a child soldier, under the General's command, until he disobeyed orders, and the General shot off both his legs. He forgives the General in this image. He risked his life as he walked up to people whose families he'd murdered. In this photograph a hostile crowd in a slum surrounds him. And Joshua remains silent as they vented their rage against him. This image, to me, is almost like from a Shakespearean play, with a man, surrounded by various influences, desperate to hold on to something true within himself, in a context of great suffering that he has created himself. I was intensely moved during all this. But the question is, does forgiveness and redemption replace justice? Joshua, in his own words, says that he does not mind standing trial for his crimes, and speaks about them from soapboxes across Monrovia, to an audience that often includes his victims. A very unlikely spokesperson for the idea of separation of church and state. The second story I'm going to tell you about is about a group of very special fighting women with rather unique peace-keeping skills. Liberia has been devastated by one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars, which has left more than 200,000 people dead, thousands of women scarred by rape and crime on a spectacular scale. Liberia is now home to an all-woman United Nations contingent of Indian peacekeepers. These women, many from small towns in India, help keep the peace, far away from home and family. They use negotiation and tolerance more often than an armed response. The commander told me that a woman could gauge a potentially violent situation much better than men. And that they were definitely capable of diffusing it non-aggressively. This man was very drunk, and he was very interested in my camera, until he noticed the women, who handled him with smiles, and AK-47s at the ready, of course. (Laughter) This contingent seems to be quite lucky, and it has not sustained any casualties, even though dozens of peacekeepers have been killed in Liberia. And yes, all of those people killed were male. Many of the women are married with children, and they say the hardest part of their deployment was being kept away from their children. I accompanied these women on their patrols, and watched as they walked past men, many who passed very lewd comments incessantly. And when I asked one of the women about the shock and awe response, she said, "Don't worry, same thing back home. We know how to deal with these fellows," and ignored them. In a country ravaged by violence against women, Indian peacekeepers have inspired many local women to join the police force. Sometimes, when the war is over and all the film crews have left, the most inspiring stories are the ones that float just beneath the radar. I came back to India and nobody was interested in buying the story. And one editor told me that she wasn't interested in doing what she called "manual labor stories." In 2007 and 2009 I did stories on the Delhi Fire Service, the DFS, which, during the summer, is probably the world's most active fire department. They answer more than 5,000 calls in just two months. And all this against incredible logistical odds, like heat and traffic jams. Something amazing happened during this shoot. Due to a traffic jam, we were late in getting to a slum, a large slum, which had caught fire. As we neared, angry crowds attacked our trucks and stoned them, by hundreds of people all over the place. These men were terrified, as the mob attacked our vehicle. But nonetheless, despite the hostility, firefighters left the vehicle and successfully fought the fire. Running the gauntlet through hostile crowds, and some wearing motorbike helmets to prevent injury. Some of the local people forcibly took away the hoses from the firemen to put out the fire in their homes. Now, hundreds of homes were destroyed. But the question that lingered in my mind was, what causes people to destroy fire trucks headed to their own homes? Where does such rage come from? And how are we responsible for this? 45 percent of the 14 million people who live in Delhi live in unauthorized slums, which are chronically overcrowded. They lack even the most basic amenities. And this is something that is common to all our big cities. Back to the DFS. A huge chemical depot caught fire, thousands of drums filled with petrochemicals were blazing away and exploding all around us. The heat was so intense, that hoses were used to cool down firefighters fighting extremely close to the fire, and with no protective clothing. In India we often love to complain about our government bodies. But over here, the heads of the DFS, Mr. R.C. Sharman, Mr. A.K. Sharman, led the firefight with their men. Something wonderful in a country where manual labor is often looked down upon. (Applause) Over the years, my faith in the power of storytelling has been tested. And I've had very serious doubt about its efficacy, and my own faith in humanity. However, a film we shot still airs on the National Geographic channel. And when it airs I get calls from all the guys I was with and they tell me that they receive hundreds of calls congratulating them. Some of the firemen told me that they were also inspired to do better because they were so pleased to get thank-yous rather than brick bats. It seems that this story helped change perceptions about the DFS, at least in the minds of an audience in part on televisions, read magazines and whose huts aren't on fire. Sometimes, focusing on what's heroic, beautiful and dignified, regardless of the context, can help magnify these intangibles three ways, in the protagonist of the story, in the audience, and also in the storyteller. And that's the power of storytelling. Focus on what's dignified, courageous and beautiful, and it grows. Thank you. (Applause)

Dragonflies that fly across oceans

{0: 'Charles Anderson studies marine life in the Maldives, a nation of coral atolls in the Indian ocean.'}

TEDIndia 2009

Actually, I come from Britain, but I've been living in Maldives for 26 years now. So, that's home really. The Maldives, as I'm sure you're aware, are a chain of islands off the southwest coast of India here. Capital, Malé, where I live. Actually, sitting here today in Mysore, we're closer to Malé than we are to Delhi, for example. If you're in IT, India, obviously, is the place to be at the moment. But if you're a marine biologist, Maldives is not such a bad place to be. And it has been my home these years. For those of you who've been there, fantastic coral reefs, fantastic diving, fantastic snorkeling. I spend as much of my time as possible investigating the marine life. I study fish, also the bigger things, whales and dolphins. This is a blue whale. We have blue whales in the waters around here, off Maldives, around the waters of India. You can see them off Kerala. And, in fact, we're very lucky in this region. One of the best places in the world to see blue whales is here in this region. In Sri Lanka, if you go down to the south coast of Sri Lanka, during the northeast monsoon season, you can see blue whales very, very easily. It's probably the best place in the world to see them. Now, when I talk about the northeast monsoon season, I'm sure many of you here know exactly what I mean, but perhaps some of you are not quite so sure. I need to explain a little bit about monsoons. Now, monsoon, the root of the word "monsoon" comes from the word "season." So, it's just a season. And there are two seasons in most of South Asia. And in the summer India heats up, gets very hot. Hot air rises, and air is drawn in off the sea to replace it. And the way it works is, it comes from the southwest. It comes off the ocean here and is drawn up towards India. So it comes from the southwest. It's a southwest monsoon. Picks up moisture as it crosses the ocean. That's what brings the monsoon rain. And then in the winter things cool down. High pressure builds over India. And the whole system goes into reverse. So, the wind is now coming from the northeast out of India, across the Indian Ocean, this way towards Africa. Keep that in mind. Now, I'm a marine biologist, but I'm actually a bit of an old fashioned naturalist, I suppose. I'm interested in all sorts of things, almost everything that moves, including dragonflies. And I'm actually going to talk, this afternoon, about dragonflies. This is a very beautiful species, it's called the Oriental Scarlet. And one thing you need to know about dragonflies, one important thing, is that they lay their eggs in fresh water. They need fresh water to breed. They lay the eggs into fresh water. Little larvae hatch out in fresh water. They feed on other little things. They feed on mosquito larvae. So, they're very important. They control mosquito larvae, among other things. And they grow and grow by stages. And they climb out of the water, burst out, as the adult which we see. And typically, there is a lot of variation, but if you have a dragonfly with, say, a one year life cycle, which is quite typical, the larva, living in the fresh water, lives for 10 or 11 months. And then the adult, which comes after, lives for one or two months. So it's essentially a freshwater animal. It really does need fresh water. Now, the particular species of dragonfly I want to talk about is this one, because most dragonflies, like the one we've just seen, when the adult is there for its brief one or two months of life, it doesn't go very far. It can't travel very far. A few kilometers, maybe, is quite typical. They are very good fliers, but they don't go too far. But this guy is an exception. And this is called the Globe Skimmer, or Wandering Glider. And, as the name might suggest, it is found pretty much around the world. It lives throughout the tropics, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, into the Pacific. And it wanders far and wide. We know that much about it. But it really hasn't been studied very much. It's a rather mediocre looking dragonfly. If you're going to study dragonflies, you want to study those really bright beautiful ones, like that red one. Or the really rare ones, the endemic endangered ones. This is, it seems a bit dull you know. It's sort of dull-colored. And it's fairly common. And it occurs everywhere — you know, why bother? But if you take that attitude, you're actually missing something rather special. Because this dragonfly has a rather amazing story to tell. And I feel very privileged to have stumbled across it living in the Maldives. When I first went to the Maldives, dead keen on diving, spent as much of my time as I could in and under the water. Didn't notice any dragonflies; maybe they were there, maybe they weren't. Didn't notice them. But after some time, after some months, one day as I was going out and about, suddenly I noticed hundreds of dragonflies, hundreds of dragonflies. Something like this, these are all this species Globe Skimmer. I didn't know at the time, but I know now, they're Globe Skimmers, hundreds of them. And they were there for some time. And then they were gone. And I didn't think anything more of it until the following year, when it happened again, and then the year after that, and then the year after that. And I was a bit slow, I didn't really take too much notice. But I asked some Maldivian friends and colleagues, and yes they come every year. And I asked people about them and yes, they knew, but they didn't know anything, where they came from, or anything. And again I didn't think too much of it. But slowly it began to dawn on me that something rather special was happening. Because dragonflies need fresh water to breed. And the Maldives, and I'm sure some of you have been there — so here is home. So, Maldives, beautiful place. (Laughter) It's built entirely of coral reefs. And on top of the coral reefs are sand banks. Average height, about that much above sea level. So, global warming, sea level rise, it's a real serious issue. But I'm not going to talk about that. Another important point of these sand banks is that when it rains, the rainwater soaks down into the soil. So, it's gone. So, it stays under the soil. The trees can put their roots into it. Humans can dig holes and make a well. But dragonflies — a bit tricky. There is no surface fresh water. There are no ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, nothing like that. So, why is it that every year millions of dragonflies, millions, millions of dragonflies turn up? I got a little bit curious. In fact I'll stop here, because I want to ask, and there is a lot of people who, from India of course, people who grew up spending your childhood here. Those of you who are Indian or spent your childhood here, let me have a show of hands, who of you — not yet, not yet! You're too keen. You're too keen. No. Hang on. Hang on. Wait for the go. I'll say go. Those of you who grew up in India, do you remember in your childhood, dragonflies, swarms of dragonflies? Maybe at school, maybe tying little bits of string onto them? Maybe pulling bits off? I'm not asking about that. You've only got to say, do you remember seeing lots of dragonflies. Any hands? Any hands? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. It's a widespread phenomenon throughout South Asia, including the Maldives. And I got a bit curious about it. In the Maldives — now, in India there is plenty of water, so, dragonflies, yeah, of course. Why not? But in Maldives, no fresh water. So, what on Earth is going on? And the first thing I did was started recording when they turned up in the Maldives. And there is the answer, 21st of October. Not every year, that's the average date. So, I've been writing it down for 15 years now. You'd think they're coming from India. It's the closest place. But in October, remember, we're still in southwest monsoon, Maldives is still in the southwest monsoon. But wind is, invariably, every time, is from the west. It's going towards India, not from India. So, are these things, how are these things getting here? Are they coming from India against the wind? Seemed a bit unlikely. So, next thing I did is I got on the phone. Maldives is a long archipelago. It stretches about 500 miles, of course it's India here. I got on the phone and emailed to friends and colleagues. When do you see the dragonflies appear? And pretty soon, a picture started emerging. In Bangalore, a colleague there sent me information for three years, average, 24th of September, so late September. Down in Trivandrum, a bit later. Far north of Maldives, a bit later. Then Malé, then further south. And then the southernmost Maldives. It's pretty obvious, they're coming from India. But they are coming 400 miles across the ocean, against the wind. How on Earth are they doing that? I didn't know. The next thing I did was I started counting dragonflies. I wanted to know about their seasonality, what time of year, this is when they first arrive, but how long are they around for? Does that give any clues? So, I started a very rigorous scientific process. I had a rigorous scientific transect. I got on my bicycle, and I cycled around the island of Malé. It's about five kilometers around, counting the dragonflies as I go, trying not to bump into people as I'm looking in the trees. And they're here for a very short time, October, November, December. That's it. And then they tail off, there's a few, but that's it. October, November, December. That is not the northeast monsoon season. That's not the southwest season. That's the inter-monsoon, the time when the monsoon changes. Now, what I said was, you get the southwest monsoon going one way, and then it changes and you get the northeast monsoon going the other way. And that sort of gives the impression you've got one air mass going up and down, up and down. It doesn't work like that. What happens, actually, is there is two air masses. And there is a front between them, and the front moves. So, if you've got India here, when the front is up above India you're into the southwest monsoon. Then the front moves into the northeast monsoon. And that front in the middle is not vertical, it's at an angle. So, as it comes over towards Malé I'm standing in Malé underneath the front. I can be in the southwest monsoon. But the wind above is from the northeast monsoon. So, the dragonflies are actually coming from India on the northeast monsoon, but at an altitude at 1,000 to 2,000 meters up in the air. Incredible. These little insects, it's the same ones we see out here [in India], two inches long, five centimeters long, flying in their millions, 400 miles across the ocean, at 2,000 meters up. Quite incredible. So, I was quite pleased with myself. I thought wow, I've tracked this one, I know how they come here. Then I scratched my head a bit, and that's okay, I know how they come here, but why do they come here? What are millions of dragonflies doing, flying out over the ocean every year to their apparent doom? It doesn't make sense. There is nothing for them in Maldives. What on Earth are they doing? Well, to cut a long story short, they're actually flying right across the ocean. They're making it all the way across to East Africa. I know that because I have friends who work on fisheries' research vessels who have sent to me reports from boats out in the ocean. I know because we have reports from Seychelles, which fit in as well, down here. And I know because when you look at the rainfall, these particular insects, these Globe Skimmers breed in temporary rain water pools. Okay, they lay their eggs where the seasonal rains are, the monsoon rains. The larvae have to develop very quickly. They only take six weeks. Instead of 11 months, they're six weeks. They're up, and they're off. Now, here we have, in case you can't read at the back, the top is rainfall for India. And we're starting in June. So this is the monsoon rain. By September, October, it's drying out. Nothing for these dragonflies. There is no more seasonal rain. They've got to go hunting for seasonal rain. And they fly south. As the monsoon withdraws to the south they come down through Karnataka, into Kerala. And then they run out of land. But they are incredibly good fliers. This particular species, it can fly for thousands of kilometers. And it just keeps going. And the wind, the northeast wind swooshes it around and carries it off across the ocean to Africa, where it's raining. And they are breeding in the rains of Africa. Now, this is southeast Africa. It makes it look like there are sort of two breeding periods here. It's slightly more complicated than that. What's happening is they are breeding in the monsoon rains here. And the dragonflies you can see today outside here, on the campus, are the young of this generation. They hatched out in India. They're looking for somewhere to breed. If it rains here they'll breed. But most of them are going to carry on. And next stop, perhaps only four or five days away is going to be East Africa. The wind will swoosh them out across here. If they pass the Maldives they might go and have a look, nothing there, they'll carry on. Here, here, Kenya, East Africa, they've actually just come out of a long drought. Just last week the rains broke. The short rains broke and it's raining there now. And the dragonflies are there. I have reports from my various contacts. The dragonflies are here now. They're breeding there. When those guys, they'll lay their eggs now. They'll hatch out in six weeks. By that time the seasonal rains have moved on. It's not there, it's down here. They'll fly down here. And the clever thing is the wind is always converging to where the rain is. The rain occurs, these are summer rains. This is a summer monsoon. The sun is overhead there. Summer rains in southern Africa. The sun is overhead, maximum heating, maximum evaporation, maximum clouds, maximum rainfall, maximum opportunities for reproduction. Not only that, because you have this convection, you have this rising of the air where it's hot, air is drawn in. There's a convergence. So, wherever the rain is falling, the air is drawn towards it to replace the air that's rising. So, the little fellow that hatches out here, he gets up into the air, he is automatically carried to where the rain is falling. Lay their eggs, next generation, they come up, automatically carried to where the rain is falling. It's now back there. They come out, it's time to come back. So, in four generations, one, two, three, four and then back. A complete circuit of the Indian Ocean. This is a circuit of about 16,000 kilometers. 16,000 kilometers, four generations, mind you, for a two inch long insect. It's quite incredible. Those of you from North America will be familiar with the Monarch butterfly. Which, up until now has had the longest known insect migration. It's only half the length of this one. And this crossing here, of the ocean, is the only truly regular transoceanic crossing of any insect. A quite incredible feat. And I only stumbled on this because I was living in Malé, in Maldives for long enough for it to percolate into my brain that something rather special was going on. But dragonflies are not the only creatures that make the crossing. There is more to the story. I'm also interested in birds. And I'm familiar with this fellow. This is a rather special bird. It's a falcon. It's called the eastern red-footed falcon, obviously. But it's also called the Amur Falcon. And it's called the Amur Falcon because it breeds in Amurland. Which is an area along the Amur River, which is up here. It's the border, much of it is the border between China and Russia, up here in the far east. So, Siberia, Manchuria. And that's where it breeds. And if you're a falcon it's quite a nice place to be in the summer. But it's a pretty miserable place to be in the winter. It's, well, you can imagine. So, as any sensible bird would do, he moves south. They move south. The whole population moves south. But then the being sensible stopped. So, now they don't stop here, or even down here. No, they turn across here. They have a little refueling stop in northeastern India. They come to the latitude of about Mumbai or Goa. And then they strike out across the ocean, down to Kenya. And down here, and they winter down here [in southern Africa]. Incredible. This is the most extraordinary migration of any bird of prey. A quite incredible migration. And they are not the only one that makes the crossing. They have the most incredible journey, but several make the crossing from India to Africa. Includes this one, the hobby. This fellow is a very nice bird, this is the Pied cuckoo. Those of you from northern India will be familiar with this. It comes with the monsoons. This time of year they cross back to Africa. And this guy, the roller, a rather beautiful bird. It's known as the Eurasian Roller. In India it occurs in the northwest, so it's known as the Kashmir Roller. And these birds, what I've done is I've complied all the records, all the available records of these birds, put them together, and found out they migrate at exactly the same time as the dragonflies. They make use of exactly the same winds. They travel at exactly the same time with the same winds to make the crossing. I know they travel at the same altitude. It's known about the Amur Falcon. This guy, unfortunately, one of these met an unfortunate end. He was flying off the coast of Goa, 21 years ago, 1988. October, 1988. An Indian Navy jet was flying off Goa, bang! In the middle of the night. Fortunately, a two engine jet got back to base, and they pulled the remains of one of these [Eurasian Rollers] out. Flying at night over the Indian Ocean 2,424 meters. Same height as the dragonflies go. So, they are using the same winds. And the other thing, the other important factor for all these birds, all medium sized fellows, and this includes the next slide as well, which is a bee-eater. Bee-eaters eat bees. This one has a nice blue cheek. It's a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater. And every one of these birds that makes the crossing from India to East Africa eats insects, large insects, the size of dragonflies. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Metaphorically speaking

{0: "Lost jobs, wayward lovers, wars and famine -- come to think of it, just about any of life's curveballs -- there's an aphorism for it, and James Geary's got it."}

TEDGlobal 2009

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words. Now, to assist me in explaining this, I've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers, the reigning king of the metaphorians, a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor. I am, of course, referring to none other than Elvis Presley. (Laughter) Now, "All Shook Up" is a great love song. It's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract — ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts — we inevitably resort to metaphor. In "All Shook Up," a touch is not a touch, but a chill. Lips are not lips, but volcanoes. She is not she, but a buttercup. And love is not love, but being all shook up. In this, Elvis is following Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. This is the mathematics of metaphor. And fortunately it's very simple. X equals Y. (Laughter) This formula works wherever metaphor is present. Elvis uses it, but so does Shakespeare in this famous line from "Romeo and Juliet:" Juliet is the sun. Now, here, Shakespeare gives the thing, Juliet, a name that belongs to something else, the sun. But whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else, we give it a whole network of analogies too. We mix and match what we know about the metaphor's source, in this case the sun, with what we know about its target, Juliet. And metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of Juliet than if Shakespeare had literally described what she looks like. So, how do we make and understand metaphors? This might look familiar. The first step is pattern recognition. Look at this image. What do you see? Three wayward Pac-Men, and three pointy brackets are actually present. What we see, however, are two overlapping triangles. Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns. Second step, conceptual synesthesia. Now, synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well, such as colored hearing. People with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters. We all have synesthetic abilities. This is the Bouba/Kiki test. What you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called Bouba, and which is called Kiki. (Laughter) If you are like 98 percent of other people, you will identify the round, amoeboid shape as Bouba, and the sharp, spiky one as Kiki. Can we do a quick show of hands? Does that correspond? Okay, I think 99.9 would about cover it. Why do we do that? Because we instinctively find, or create, a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of Bouba, and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of Kiki. And many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic. Silence is sweet. Neckties are loud. Sexually attractive people are hot. Sexually unattractive people leave us cold. Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another. Third step is cognitive dissonance. This is the Stroop test. What you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed. You can take the test now. If you're like most people, you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink. The test shows that we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer. Stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well. The participants had to identify, as quickly as possible, the literally false sentences. They took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences. Why? Because we cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either. One of the sentences was, "Some jobs are jails." Now, unless you're a prison guard, the sentence "Some jobs are jails" is literally false. Sadly, it's metaphorically true. And the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false. Metaphor matters because it's around us every day, all the time. Metaphor matters because it creates expectations. Pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news. Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in, "The NASDAQ climbed higher." Object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things, as in, "The Dow fell like a brick." Researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries, and then predict the next day's price trend. Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue. And they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal. If, for example, house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing, higher and higher, people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable. They may feel confident, say, in taking out mortgages they really can't afford. That's a hypothetical example of course. But this is how metaphor misleads. Metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies. A group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the U.S. for help. And they had to make a decision. What should they do? Intervene, appeal to the U.N., or do nothing? They were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis. Each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy: World War II, Vietnam, and the third was historically neutral. Those exposed to the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others. Just as we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words, we cannot ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor. Metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery. Whenever we solve a problem, or make a discovery, we compare what we know with what we don't know. And the only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former. Einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play. He famously used thought experiments, which are essentially elaborate analogies, to come up with some of his greatest discoveries. By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery. Now metaphor is ubiquitous, yet it's hidden. But you just have to look at the words around you and you'll find it. Ralph Waldo Emerson described language as "fossil poetry." But before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor. And these fossils still breathe. Take the three most famous words in all of Western philosophy: "Cogito ergo sum." That's routinely translated as, "I think, therefore I am." But there is a better translation. The Latin word "cogito" is derived from the prefix "co," meaning "together," and the verb "agitare," meaning "to shake." So, the original meaning of "cogito" is to shake together. And the proper translation of "cogito ergo sum" is "I shake things up, therefore I am." (Laughter) Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process. The mind is a plastic snow dome, the most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself, when, as Elvis put it, it's all shook up. And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling and rolling, long after Elvis has left the building. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A new way to fight corruption

{0: 'Shaffi Mather is the founder of 1298 for Ambulance, Education Access for All, and co-promoter of Moksha-Yug Access.'}

TEDIndia 2009

The anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career change last year, becoming a full-time practicing lawyer. My experiences over the last 18 months, as a lawyer, has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial idea, which I believe is indeed worth spreading. So, I share it with all of you here today, though the idea itself is getting crystallized and I'm still writing up the business plan. Of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the number of ideas which have failed increases. I've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993. I've explored, experienced, and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my heart's content. I built, along with my two brothers, the leading real estate company in my home state, Kerala, and then worked professionally with two of India's biggest businessmen, but in their startup enterprises. In 2003, when I stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector issues, I definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find for-profit solutions to addressing pressing public issues. When life brought about a series of death and near-death experiences within my close circle, which highlighted the need for an emergency medical response service in India, similar to 911 in USA. To address this, I, along with four friends, founded Ambulance Access for All, to promote life-support ambulance services in India. For those from the developing world, there is nothing, absolutely nothing new in this idea. But as we envisioned it, we had three key goals: Providing world-class life support ambulance service which is fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams, and universally accessible to anyone in a medical emergency, irrespective of the capability to pay. The service which grew out of this, Dial 1298 for Ambulance, with one ambulance in 2004, now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states, and has transported over 100,000 patients and victims since inception. The service is — (Applause) fully self-sustainable from its own revenues, without accessing any public funds, and the cross-subsidy model actually works, where the rich pays higher, poor pays lower, and the accident victim is getting the service free of charge. The service responded effectively and efficiently, during the unfortunate 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. And as you can see from the visuals, the service was responding and rescuing victims from the incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike. We ended up being the first medical response team in every incident location and transported 125 victims, saving life. (Applause) In tribute and remembrance of 26/11 attacks over the last one year, we have actually helped a Pakistani NGO, Aman Foundation, to set up a self-sustainable life support ambulance service in Karachi, facilitated by Acumen Fund. (Applause) It's a small message from us, in our own small way to the enemies of humanity, of Islam, of South Asia, of India, and of Pakistan, that humanity will continue to bloom, irrespective of such dastardly attacks. Since then I've also co-founded two other social enterprises. One is Education Access for All, setting up schools in small-town India. And the other is Moksha-Yug Access, which is integrating rural supply chain on the foundations of self-help group-based microfinance. I guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right. Because diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in funding. With the significance being these funds have come in as a QT capital, not as grant or as philanthropy. Now I come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that I'm exploring. Corruption, bribes, and lack of transparency. You may be surprised to know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their talks. Bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side, with the supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless common man. And the demand side being mostly politicians, bureaucrats and those who have discretionary power vested with them. According to World Bank estimate, one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every year, worsening the condition of the already worse off. Yet, if you analyze the common man, he or she does not wake up every day and say, "Hmm, let me see who I can pay a bribe to today." or, "Let me see who I can corrupt today." Often it is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe. In the modern day world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life. Now, let me ask you another question. Imagine you are being asked to pay a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done. What do you do? Of course you can call the police. But what is the use if the police department is in itself steeped in corruption? Most definitely you don't want to pay the bribe. But you also don't have the time, resources, expertise or wherewithal to fight this. Unfortunately, many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies and market forces. Yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service where you can call in, pay a fee, and fight the demand for a bribe. Like a bribe buster service, or 1-800-Fight-Bribes, or www.stopbribes.org or www.preventcorruption.org. Such a service simply do not exist. One image that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother, 70 plus years, being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office. All she needed was permission to build three steps to her house, from ground level, making it easier for her to enter and exit her house. Yet the officer in charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe. Even though it pricked my conscience then, I could not, or rather I did not tend to her or assist her, because I was busy building my real estate company. I don't want to be haunted by such images any more. A group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement. And in all 42 cases where we have pushed back such demands using existing and legitimate tools like the Right to Information Act, video, audio, or peer pressure, we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve without actually paying a bribe. And with the cost of these tools being substantially lower than the bribe demanded. I believe that these tools that worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a BPO kind of environment, and made available on web, call-center and franchise physical offices, for a fee, to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a bribe. The target market is as tempting as it can get. It can be worth up to one trillion dollars, being paid in bribes every year, or equal to India's GDP. And it is an absolutely virgin market. I propose to explore this idea further, to examine the potential of creating a for-profit, fee-based BPO kind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption. I do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy. It never has been and it never will be. In my last 18 months as a lawyer, battling small- and large-scale corruption, including the one perpetrated by India's biggest corporate scamster. Through his charities I have had three police cases filed against me alleging trespass, impersonation and intimidation. The battle against corruption exacts a toll on ourselves, our families, our friends, and even our kids. Yet I believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and making the world a fairer place. What gives us the courage? As my close friend replied, when told during the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs, I quote: "Of course we cannot fail in this, at least in our own minds. For we are insane people, trying to do an impossible task. And an insane person does not know what an impossible task is." Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Shaffi, that is a really exciting business idea. Shaffi Mather: I just have to get through the initial days where I don't get eliminated. (Laughter) CA: What's on your mind? I mean, give us a sense of the numbers here — a typical bribe and a typical fee. I mean, what's in your head? SM: So let me ... Let me give you an example. Somebody who had applied for the passport. The officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around 3,000 rupees in bribes. And he did not want to pay. So we actually used the Right to Information Act, which is equal to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, and pushed back the officers in this particular case. And in all these 42 cases, when we kept pushing them back, there was three kinds of reaction. A set of people actually say, "Oh, let me just grant it to them, and run away from it." Some people actually come back and say, "Oh, you want to screw me. Let me show you what I can do." And he will push us back. So you take the next step, or use the next tool available in what we are putting together, and then he relents. By the third time, in all 42 cases, we have achieved success. CA: But if it's a 3,000-rupee, 70-dollar bribe, what fee would you have to charge, and can you actually make the business work? SM: Well, actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees. So, it actually works. CA: That's a high gross margin business. I like it. (Laughter) SM: I actually did not want to answer this on the TED stage. CA: OK, so these are provisional numbers, no pricing guarantee. If you can pull this off, you will be a global hero. I mean, this could be huge. Thank you so much for sharing this idea at TED. (Applause)

Fusion is energy's future

{0: "Steven Cowley directs the UK's leading fusion research center. Soon he'll helm new experiments that may make cheap fusion energy real on a commercial scale. "}

TEDGlobal 2009

The key question is, "When are we going to get fusion?" It's really been a long time since we've known about fusion. We've known about fusion since 1920, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that's why the sun shines. I've always been very worried about resource. I don't know about you, but when my mother gave me food, I always sorted the ones I disliked from the ones I liked. And I ate the disliked ones first, because the ones you like, you want to save. And as a child you're always worried about resource. And once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world's resources, I got very upset, about as upset as I did when I realized that the Earth will only last about five billion years before it's swallowed by the sun. Big events in my life, a strange child. (Laughter) Energy, at the moment, is dominated by resource. The countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them. Coal-powered industrial revolution in this country — oil, gas, sorry. (Laughter) Gas, I'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when Mister Putin turns off the gas tap, because my budget goes up. We're really dominated now by those things that we're using up faster and faster and faster. And as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the Third World, in the developing world, we're using energy faster and faster. And those resources are going away. And the way we'll make energy in the future is not from resource, it's really from knowledge. If you look 50 years into the future, the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three, with some wind, with some other things, but these are going to be the base load energy drivers. Solar can do it, and we certainly have to develop solar. But we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world. Fission. Our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations. They're going to put in six new nuclear power stations, and probably more after that. China is building nuclear power stations. Everybody is. Because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy. But if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is, the perfect energy source is one that doesn't take up much space, has a virtually inexhaustible supply, is safe, doesn't put any carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't leave any long-lived radioactive waste: it's fusion. But there is a catch. Of course there is always a catch in these cases. Fusion is very hard to do. We've been trying for 50 years. Okay. What is fusion? Here comes the nuclear physics. And sorry about that, but this is what turns me on. (Laughter) I was a strange child. Nuclear energy comes for a simple reason. The most stable nucleus is iron, right in the middle of the periodic table. It's a medium-sized nucleus. And you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy. So, uranium, which is very big, wants to split. But small atoms want to join together, small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron. And you can get energy out this way. And indeed that's exactly what stars do. In the middle of stars, you're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon, to make oxygen, all the things that you're made of are made in the middle of stars. But it's a hard process to do because, as you know, the middle of a star is quite hot, almost by definition. And there is one reaction that's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do. It's between two isotopes of hydrogen, two kinds of hydrogen: deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen, which you can get from seawater, and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen. These two nuclei, when they're far apart, are charged. And you push them together and they repel. But when you get them close enough, something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together. So, most of the time they repel. You get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together. For a moment they become helium 5, because they've got five particles inside them. So, that's that process there. Deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5. Helium splits out, and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out. If you can get something to about 150 million degrees, things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration, this will happen, and it will release energy. And that energy is what powers fusion. And it's this reaction that we want to do. There is one trickiness about this reaction. Well, there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees, but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet. It's pretty hot. The trickiness about the reaction is that tritium doesn't exist in nature. You have to make it from something else. And you make if from lithium. That reaction at the bottom, that's lithium 6, plus a neutron, will give you more helium, plus tritium. And that's the way you make your tritium. But fortunately, if you can do this fusion reaction, you've got a neutron, so you can make that happen. Now, why the hell would we bother to do this? This is basically why we would bother to do it. If you just plot how much fuel we've got left, in units of present world consumption. And as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil — the blue line, by the way, is the lowest estimate of existing resources. And the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate. And as you go across there you will see that we've got a few tens of years, and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left. And god knows we don't really want to burn all of it, because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air. And then we get to uranium. And with current reactor technology we really don't have very much uranium. And we will have to extract uranium from sea water, which is the yellow line, to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us. This is a bit shocking, because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet Kyoto, and do all those kind of things. To go any further you would have to have breeder technology. And breeder technology is fast breeders. And that's pretty dangerous. The big thing, on the right, is the lithium we have in the world. And lithium is in sea water. That's the yellow line. And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water. Everybody can get it. That's why we want to do fusion. Is it cost-competitive? We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant. And we get within about the same price as current electricity. So, how would we make it? We have to hold something at 150 million degrees. And, in fact, we've done this. We hold it with a magnetic field. And inside it, right in the middle of this toroidal shape, doughnut shape, right in the middle is 150 million degrees. It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees. And in fact we can make fusion happen. And just down the road, this is JET. It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion. When people say fusion is 30 years away, and always will be, I say, "Yeah, but we've actually done it." Right? We can do fusion. In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997. And in 2013 we're going to fire it up again and break all those records. But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen. We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor. Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth. This is the device we're building now. It gets very expensive to do this research. It turns out you can't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense. Right? You can't. You have to do it in a very big device. More than half the world's population is involved in building this device in southern France, which is a nice place to put an experiment. Seven nations are involved in building this. It's going to cost us 10 billion. And we'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power. But that's not electricity yet. We have to get to this. We have to get to a power plant. We have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology. And I'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is. But at the moment, all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s. I wish this were different. We really need it now. We're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country. So 2030 looks like an infinity away. But we can't abandon it now; we have to push forward, get fusion to happen. I wish we had more money, I wish we had more resources. But this is what we're aiming at, sometime in the 2030s — real electric power from fusion. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My message of peace from Pakistan

{0: 'Asher Hasan\'s social enterprise Naya Jeevan (the name means "new life" in Urdu and Hindi) is the emerging world\'s first HMO for the urban, working poor.'}

TEDIndia 2009

Namaste. Salaam. Shalom. Sat Sri Akal. Greetings to all of you from Pakistan. It is often said that we fear that which we do not know. And Pakistan, in this particular vein, is very similar. Because it has provoked, and does provoke, a visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul, especially when viewed through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil. But there are many other dimensions to Pakistan. And what follows is a stream of images, a series of images captured by some of Pakistan's most dynamic and young photographers, that aims to give you an alternative glimpse, a look inside the hearts and minds of some ordinary Pakistani citizens. Here are some of the stories they wanted us to share with you. My name is Abdul Khan. I come from Peshawar. I hope that you will be able to see not just my Taliban-like beard, but also the richness and color of my perceptions, aspirations and dreams, as rich and colorful as the satchels that I sell. My name is Meher and this is my friend Irim. I hope to become a vet when I grow up so that I can take care of stray cats and dogs who wander around the streets of the village that I live near Gilgit, northern Pakistan. My name is Kailash. And I like to enrich lives through technicolored glass. Madame, would you like some of those orange bangles with the pink polka dots? My name is Zamin. And I'm an IDP, an internally displaced person, from Swat. Do you see me on the other side of this fence? Do I matter, or really exist for you? My name is Iman. I am a fashion model, an up-and-coming model from Lahore. Do you see me simply smothered in cloth? Or can you move beyond my veil and see me for who I truly am inside? My name is Ahmed. I am an Afghan refugee from the Khyber agency. I have come from a place of intense darkness. And that is why I want to illuminate the world. My name is Papusay. My heart and drum beat as one. If religion is the opium of the masses, then for me, music is my one and only ganja. A rising tide lifts all boats. And the rising tide of India's spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a buoyant middle class. But there are still over 650 million Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, who remain washed up on the shores of poverty. Therefore as India and Pakistan, as you and I, it behooves us to transcend our differences, to celebrate our diversity, to leverage our common humanity. Our collective vision at Naya Jeevan, which for many of you, as you all recognize, means "new life" in Urdu and Hindi, is to rejuvenate the lives of millions of low income families by providing them with affordable access to catastrophic health care. Indeed it is the emerging world's first HMO for the urban working poor. Why should we do this as Indians and Pakistanis? We are but two threads cut from the same cloth. And if our fates are intertwined, then we believe that it is good karma, it is good fortune. And for many of us, our fortunes do indeed lie at the bottom of the pyramid. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Fantastic. Just stay up here. That was fantastic. I found that really moving. You know, we fought hard to get at least a small Pakistani contingent to come. It felt like it was really important. They went through a lot to get here. Would the Pakistanis please just stand up please? I just really wanted to acknowledge you. (Applause) Thank you so much.

My solar-powered adventure

{0: 'Bertrand Piccard circumnavigated the Earth in a hot-air balloon. Now he wants to circle it in an airplane powered only by solar energy. '}

TEDGlobal 2009

Well, I learned a lot of things about ballooning, especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world I did with Brian Jones. When I took this picture, the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night. And on the other side there was a rising sun. So, you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown, you have the non-obvious, you have the non-seen, for the people who don't dare to go through the ice. There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side. And I think that's one of the main problems of our society. We learn, maybe not the famous TED audience, but so many other people learn, that the unknown, the doubts, the question marks are dangerous. And we have to resist to the changes. We have to keep everything under control. Well, the unknown is part of life. And in that sense, ballooning is a beautiful metaphor. Because in the balloon, like in life, we go very well in unforeseen directions. We want to go in a direction, but the winds push us in another direction, like in life. And as long as we fight horizontally, against life, against the winds, against what's happening to us, life is a nightmare. How do we steer a balloon? By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction. So, then, we understand that if we want to change our trajectory, in life, or in the balloon, we have to change altitude. Changing altitude, in life, that means raising to another psychological, philosophical, spiritual level. But how do we do that? In ballooning, or in life, how do we change altitude? How do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day? Well, in a balloon it's easy, we have ballast. And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb. Sand, water, all the equipment we don't need anymore. And I think in life it should be exactly like this. You know, when people speak about pioneering spirit, very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas. It's not true. The pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas, because new ideas are so easy to have. We just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas. No, the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast. Habits, certainties, convictions, exclamation marks, paradigms, dogmas. And when we are able to do that, what happens? Life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension. No. Life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions. And pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis. Of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon, but in life itself. Explore this vertical axis, that means explore all the different ways to do, all the different ways to behave, all the different ways to think, before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish. This is very practical. This can be in politics. This can be in spirituality. This can be in environment, in finance, in education of children. I deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing. Because we will throw away these political dogmas. I deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid — if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past. And that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas. Throwing overboard, as ballast, to change our direction. Well, these basically are things I believed in such a long time. But actually I had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it. (Laughter) (Applause) It's clear that it's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take. Sometime we need friends, family members or a psychiatrist. Well, in balloons we need weather men, the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind, at which altitude, in order to help the balloonist. But sometimes it's very paradoxical. When Brian Jones and I were flying around the world, the weather man asked us, one day, to fly quite low, and very slow. And when we calculated we thought we're never going to make it around the world at that speed. So, we disobeyed. We flew much higher, and double the speed. And I was so proud to have found that jetstream that I called the weather man, and I told him, "Hey, guy, don't you think we're good pilots up there? We fly twice the speed you predicted." And he told me, "Don't do that. Go down immediately in order to slow down." And I started to argue. I said, "I'm not going to do that. We don't have enough gas to fly so slow." And he told me, "Yes, but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast, in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the North Pole. (Laughter) And then he asked me — and this is something I will never forget in my life — he just asked me, "You're the good pilot up there. What do you really want? You want to go very fast in the wrong direction, or slowly in the good direction? (Laughter) (Applause) And this is why you need weathermen. This is why you need people with long-term vision. And this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now, in the political governments. We are burning, as you heard, so much energy, not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life cannot last for long. So, we went down actually. We slowed down. And we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers. But we were expected to have doubts; we're expected to have fears. And actually this is where the adventure really started. When we were flying over the Sahara and India it was nice holidays. We could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane. In the middle of the Pacific, when you don't have the good winds, you cannot land, you cannot go back. That's a crisis. That's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking. That's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential, your creativity. That's when you throw out all the ballast, all the certainties, in order to adapt to the new situation. And actually, we changed completely our flight plan. We changed completely our strategy. And after 20 days we landed successfully in Egypt. But if I show you this picture it's not to tell you how happy we were. It's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles. We took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane. We landed with 40 kilos. When I saw that, I made a promise to myself. I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world, it would be with no fuel, independent from fossil energies, in order to be safe, not to be threatened by the fuel gauge. I had no idea how it was possible. I just thought it's a dream and I want to do it. And when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh, with Apollo 11, with the Wright Brothers' Flyer, with Chuck Yeager's 61, I had really a thought then. I thought, well, the 20th century, that was brilliant. It allowed to do all those things there. But it will not be possible in the future any more. It takes too much energy. It will cost too much. It will be prohibited because we'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now. So how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy? And this is when the project Solar Impulse really started to turn in my head. And I think it's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century. Pioneering spirit should continue, but on another level. Not to conquer the planet or space, not anymore, it has been done, but rather to improve the quality of life. How can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing? What is today completely impossible — get rid of our dependency on fossil energy. If you tell to people, we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world, people will laugh at you, except here, where crazy people are invited to speak. (Laughter) So, the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane, using absolutely no fuel, nobody ever could say in the future that it's impossible to do it for cars, for heating systems, for computers, and so on and so on. Well, solar power airplanes are not new. They have flown in the past, but without saving capabilities, without batteries. Which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it. If we want to show the potential, we have to fly day and night. That means to load the batteries during the flight, in order to spend the night on the batteries, and fly the next day again. It has been made, already, on remote controlled little airplane models, without pilots. But it stays an anecdote because the public couldn't identify to it. I think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities, that can talk to students, talk to politicians during the flight, and really make it a human adventure. For that, unfortunately, four meters wingspan is not enough. You need 64 meter wingspan. 64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot, the batteries, flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency. Why that? Because fuel is not easy to replace. That's for sure. And with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane, we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs. That means a Christmas tree, a big Christmas tree. So the question is, how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree? People will tell you it's impossible, and that's exactly why we try to do it. We launched the project with my colleague Andre Borschberg six years ago. We have now 70 people in the team working on it. We have gone through the stages of simulation, design, computing, preparing the construction of the first prototype. That has been achieved after two years of work. Cockpit, propeller, engine. Just the fuselage here, it's so light. It's not designed by an artist, but it could be. 50 kilos for the entire fuselage. Couple of kilos more for the wing spars. This is the complete structure of the airplane. And one month ago we have unveiled it. You cannot imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it's not only a dream and a vision, it's a real airplane. A real airplane that we could finally present. And what's the goal now? The goal is to take off, end of this year for the first test, but mainly next year, spring or summer, take off, on our own power, without additional help, without being towed, climb to 9,000 meters altitude. The same time we load the batteries, we run the engines, and when we get at the maximum height, we arrive at the beginning of the night. And there, there will be just one goal, just one: reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty. (Laughter) And this is exactly the symbol of our world. If our airplane is too heavy, if the pilot wastes energy, we'll never make it through the night. And in our world, if we keep on spoiling, wasting our energy resources, if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt, it's clear that we'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem. So, you see that this airplane is more a symbol. I don't think it will transport 200 people in the next years. But when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel. And 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the Atlantic. So, we have to start, and show the example. A little bit like on this picture here. This is a painting from Magritte, in the museum in Holland that I love so much. It's a pipe, and it's written, "This is not a pipe." This is not an airplane. This is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible, when we have a team, when we have pioneering spirit, and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard. What pleases me very much is that in the beginning I thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood. And more and more, we're invited around the world with Andre to talk about that project, to talk about the symbol of it, invited by politicians, invited in energy forums, in order to show that it's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies. So, through speeches like this one today, through interviews, through meetings, our goal is to get as many people possible on the team. The success will not come if we "just," quote, unquote, fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane. No, the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life, save energy, go to renewables. And this is possible. You know, with the technologies we have today, we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in Europe, and we can solve half of the rest with renewables. It leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or whatever. This is acceptable. This is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team. You can just go on SolarImpulse.com, subscribe to just be informed of what we're doing. But much more, to get advices, to give your comments, to spread the word that if it's possible in the air, of course it's possible in the ground. And each time we have some ice in the future, we have to know that life will be great, and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice, to go through the obstacle, to go through the problem, in order to see what there is on the other side. So, you see, this is what we're doing on our side. Everyone has his goal, has his dreams, has his visions. The question I leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard? Which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life, to get to the success that you wish to have, to get to the point that really belongs to you, with the potential you have, and the one you can really fulfill? Because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential, and our own passion. So, let's go for it, and I wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future. Thank you. (Applause)

The neurons that shaped civilization

{0: 'Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran looks deep into the brain’s most basic mechanisms. By working with those who have very specific mental disabilities caused by brain injury or stroke, he can map functions of the mind to physical structures of the brain. '}

TEDIndia 2009

I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. Just think about this problem for a second. Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God. And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. We're looking at neurons here. There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. So, how do you go about studying the brain? One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. This is what I spoke about in the last TED. Today I'll talk about a different approach, which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain. Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time. But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action. Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. So, this is important for imitation and emulation. Well, why is that important? Well, let's take a look at the next slide. So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation. Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly. Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations. So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population. This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. So, it's empathizing the other person being touched. So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "Don't worry, you're not being touched. So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch, otherwise you'll get confused and muddled." Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. (Laughter) And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. All that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness. And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged. So, here you have my last slide. For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you. (Applause)

Exposing the invisible

{0: 'Logging countless hours behind an X-ray machine, Nick Veasey illuminates the labyrinthine secrets hidden beneath the exteriors of everyday objects.'}

TEDGlobal 2009

So, 120 years ago, Dr. Röntgen X-rayed his wife's hand. Quite why he had to pin her fingers to the floor with her brooch, I'm not sure. It seems a bit extreme to me. That image was the start of the X-ray technology. And I'm still fundamentally using the same principles today. I'm interpreting it in a more contemporary manner. The first shot I ever did was of a soda can, which was to promote a brand that we all know, so I'm not going to do them any favors by showing you it. But the second shot I did was my shoes I was wearing on the day. And I do really like this shot, because it shows all the detritus that's sort of embedded in the sole of the sneakers. It was just one of those pot-luck things where you get it right first time. Moving on to something a bit larger, this is an X-ray of a bus. And the bus is full of people. It's actually the same person. It's just one skeleton. And back in the '60s, they used to teach student radiographers to take X-rays, thankfully not on you and I, but on dead people. So, I've still got access to one of these dead people called Frieda; she's falling apart, I'm afraid, because she's very old and fragile. But everyone on that bus is Frieda. And the bus is taken with a cargo-scanning X-ray, which is the sort of machine you have on borders, which checks for contraband and drugs and bombs and things. Fairly obvious what that is. So, using large-scale objects does sort of create drama because you just don't see X-rays of big things that often. Technology is moving ahead, and these large cargo scanner X-rays that work with the digital system are getting better and better and better. Again though, to make it come alive you need, somehow, to add the human element. And I think the reason this image works, again, is because Frieda is driving the bulldozer. (Laughter) Quite a difficult brief, make a pair of men's pants look beautiful. But I think the process, in itself, shows how exquisite they are. Fashion — now, I'm sort of anti-fashion because I don't show the surface, I show what's within. So, the fashionistas don't really like me because it doesn't matter if Kate Moss is wearing it or if I'm wearing it, it looks the same. (Laughter) We all look the same inside, believe me. The creases in the material and the sort of nuances. And I show things for really what they are, what they're made of. I peel back the layers and expose it. And if it's well made I show it, if it's badly made I show it. And I'm sure Ross can associate that with design. The design comes from within. It's not just Topshop, I get some strange looks when I go out getting my props. Here I was fumbling around in the ladies' underwear department of a department store, almost got escorted from the premises. I live opposite a farm. And this was the runt of the litter, a piglet that died. And what's really interesting is, if you look at the legs, you'll notice that the bones haven't fused. And should that pig have grown, unfortunately it was dead, it would have certainly been dead after I X-rayed it, with the amount of radiation I used anyway. (Laughter) But once the bones had fused together it would have been healthy. So, that's an empty parka jacket. But I quite love the way it's posed. Nature is my greatest inspiration. And to carry on with a theme that we've already touched with is how nature is related to architecture. If you look at the roof of the Eden Project, or the British library, it's all this honeycomb structure. And I'm sure those architects are inspired, as I am, by what surrounds us, by nature. This, in fact, is a Victoria water lily leaf that floats on the top of a pond. An amaryllis flower looking really three-dimensional. Seaweed, ebbing in the tide. Now, how do I do this, and where do I do this, and all of that sort of thing. This is my new, purpose-built, X-ray shed. And the door to my X-ray room is made of lead and steel. It weighs 1,250 kilograms and the only exercise I get is opening and closing it. (Laughter) The walls are 700 millimeters thick of solid dense concrete. So, I'm using quite a lot of radiation. A lot more than you'd get in a hospital or a vet's. And there I am. This is a quite high-powered X-ray machine. What's interesting really about X-ray really is, if you think about it, is that that technology is used for looking for cancer or looking for drugs, or looking for contraband or whatever. And I use that sort of technology to create things that are quite beautiful. So, still working with film, I'm afraid. Technology in X-ray where it's life-size processed, apart from these large cargo-scanning machines, hasn't moved on enough for the quality of the image and the resolution to be good enough for what I want to do with it, which is show my pictures big. So, I have to use a 1980s drum scanner, which was designed in the days when everyone shot photographs on film. They scan each individual X-ray. And this shows how I do my process of same-size X-rays. So, this is, again, my daughter's dress. Still has the tag in it from me buying it, so I can take it back to the shop if she didn't like it. But there are four X-ray plates. You can see them overlapping. So, when you move forward from something fairly small, a dress which is this size, onto something like that which is done in exactly the same process, you can see that that is a lot of work. In fact, that is three months solid X-raying. There is over 500 separate components. Boeing sent me a 747 in containers. And I sent them back an X-ray. (Laughter) I kid you not. Okay, so Frieda is my dead skeleton. This, unfortunately, is basically two pictures. One on the extreme right is a photograph of an American footballer. The one on the left is an x-ray. But this time I had to use a real body. Because I needed all the skin tissue to make it look real, to make it look like it was a real athlete. So, here I had to use a recently deceased body. And getting a hold of that was extremely difficult and laborious. But people do donate their bodies to art and science. And when they do, I'm in the queue. So, I like to use them. (Laughter) The coloring, so coloring adds another level to the X-rays. It makes it more organic, more natural. It's whatever takes my fancy, really. It's not accurately colored to how it is in real life. That flower doesn't come in bright orange, I don't think. But I just like it in bright orange. And also with something technical, like these are DJ decks, it sort of adds another level. It makes a two dimensional image look more three dimensional. The most difficult things to X-ray, the most technically challenging things to X-ray are the lightest things, the most delicate things. To get the detail in a feather, believe me, if there is anyone out here who knows anything about X-rays, that's quite a challenge. I'm now going to show you a short film, I'll step to the side. Video: (Music) The thing in there is very dangerous. If you touch that, you could possibly die through radiation poisoning. In my career I've had two exposures to radiation, which is two too many, because it stays with you for life. It's cumulative. (Music) It has human connotations. The fact that it's a child's toy that we all recognize, but also it looks like it's a robot, and it comes from a sci-fi genus. It's a surprise that it has humanity, but also man-made, future, alien associations. And it's just a bit spooky. (Music) The bus was done with a cargo-scanning X-ray machine, which is used on the borders between countries, looking for contraband and illegal immigrants. The lorry goes in front of it. And it takes slices of X-rays through the lorry. And that's how this was done. It's actually slice, slice. It's a bit like a CT scanner in a hospital. Slices. And then if you look carefully, there is all little things. He's got headphones on, reading the newspaper, got a hat on, glasses, got a bag. So, these little details help to make it work, make it real. (Music) The problem with using living people is that to take an X-ray, if I X-ray you, you get exposed to radiation. So, to avoid that — I have to avoid it somehow — is I use dead people. Now, that's a variety of things, from recently deceased bodies, to a skeleton that was used by student radiographers to train in taking X-rays of the human body, at different densities. (Music) I have very high-tech equipment of gloves, scissors and a bucket. (Music) I will show how the capillary action works, how it feeds, I'll be able to get all the cells inside that stem. Because it transfers food from its roots to its leaves. Look at this monster. (Music) It's so basic. It just grows wild. That's what I really like about it, the fact that I haven't got to go and buy it, and it hasn't been genetically modified at all. It's just happening. And the X-ray shows how beautiful nature can be. Not that that is particularly beautiful when you look at it with the human eye, the way the leaves form. They're curling back on each other. So the X-ray will show the overlaps in these little corners. The thicker the object, the more radiation it needs, and the more time it needs. The lighter the object, the less radiation. Sometimes you keep the time up, because the time gives you detail. The longer the exposure goes on for, the more detail you get. (Music) If you look at this, just the tube, it is quite bright. But I could get a bit darker in the tube, but everything else would suffer. So, these leaves at the edge would start to disappear. What I like is how hard the edges are, how sharp. Yeah, I'm quite pleased with it. (Music) I travel beyond the surface and show something for what it's worth, for what it's really made of, how it really works. But also I find that I've got the benefit of taking away all the surface, which is things that people are used to seeing. And that's the sort of thing I've been doing. I've got the opportunity now to show you what I'm going to be doing in the future. This is a commercial application of my most recent work. And what's good about this, I think, is that it's like a moment in time, like you've turned around, you've got X-ray vision and you've taken a picture with the X-ray camera. Unfortunately I haven't got X-ray vision. I do dream in X-ray. I see my projects in my sleep. And I know what they're going to look like in X-ray and I'm not far off. So, what am I doing in the future? Well, this year is the 50th anniversary of Issigonis's Mini, which is one of my favorite cars. So, I've taken it apart, component by component, months and months and months of work. And with this image, I'm going to be displaying it in the Victoria and Albert Museum as a light box, which is actually attached to the car. So, I've got to saw the car in half, down the middle, not an easy task, in itself. And then, so you can get in the driver's side, sit down, and up against you is a wall. And if you get out and walk around to the other side of the car, you see a life-sized light box of the car showing you how it works. And I'm going to take that idea and apply it to other sort of iconic things from my life. Like, my first computer was a big movement in my life. And I had a Mac Classic. And it's a little box. And I think that would look quite neat as an X-ray. I'm also looking to take my work from the two-dimensional form to a more three-dimensional form. And this is quite a good way of doing it. I'm also working now with X-ray video. So, if you can imagine, some of these flowers, and they're actually moving and growing and you can film that in X-ray, should be quite stunning. But that's it. I'm done. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How to live to be 100+

{0: "National Geographic writer and explorer Dan Buettner studies the world's longest-lived peoples, distilling their secrets into a single plan for health and long life."}

TEDxTC

Something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 10 percent of how long the average person lives, within certain biological limits, is dictated by our genes. The other 90 percent is dictated by our lifestyle. So the premise of Blue Zones: if we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity we can come up with a de facto formula for longevity. But if you ask the average American what the optimal formula of longevity is, they probably couldn't tell you. They've probably heard of the South Beach Diet, or the Atkins Diet. You have the USDA food pyramid. There is what Oprah tells us. There is what Doctor Oz tells us. The fact of the matter is there is a lot of confusion around what really helps us live longer better. Should you be running marathons or doing yoga? Should you eat organic meats or should you be eating tofu? When it comes to supplements, should you be taking them? How about these hormones or resveratrol? And does purpose play into it? Spirituality? And how about how we socialize? Well, our approach to finding longevity was to team up with National Geographic, and the National Institute on Aging, to find the four demographically confirmed areas that are geographically defined. And then bring a team of experts in there to methodically go through exactly what these people do, to distill down the cross-cultural distillation. And at the end of this I'm going to tell you what that distillation is. But first I'd like to debunk some common myths when it comes to longevity. And the first myth is if you try really hard you can live to be 100. False. The problem is, only about one out of 5,000 people in America live to be 100. Your chances are very low. Even though it's the fastest growing demographic in America, it's hard to reach 100. The problem is that we're not programmed for longevity. We are programmed for something called procreative success. I love that word. It reminds me of my college days. Biologists term procreative success to mean the age where you have children and then another generation, the age when your children have children. After that the effect of evolution completely dissipates. If you're a mammal, if you're a rat or an elephant, or a human, in between, it's the same story. So to make it to age 100, you not only have to have had a very good lifestyle, you also have to have won the genetic lottery. The second myth is, there are treatments that can help slow, reverse, or even stop aging. False. When you think of it, there is 99 things that can age us. Deprive your brain of oxygen for just a few minutes, those brain cells die, they never come back. Play tennis too hard, on your knees, ruin your cartilage, the cartilage never comes back. Our arteries can clog. Our brains can gunk up with plaque, and we can get Alzheimer's. There is just too many things to go wrong. Our bodies have 35 trillion cells, trillion with a "T." We're talking national debt numbers here. (Laughter) Those cells turn themselves over once every eight years. And every time they turn themselves over there is some damage. And that damage builds up. And it builds up exponentially. It's a little bit like the days when we all had Beatles albums or Eagles albums and we'd make a copy of that on a cassette tape, and let our friends copy that cassette tape, and pretty soon, with successive generations that tape sounds like garbage. Well, the same things happen to our cells. That's why a 65-year-old person is aging at a rate of about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old person. So, if there is nothing you can do to slow your aging or stop your aging, what am I doing here? Well, the fact of the matter is the best science tells us that the capacity of the human body, my body, your body, is about 90 years, a little bit more for women. But life expectancy in this country is only 78. So somewhere along the line, we're leaving about 12 good years on the table. These are years that we could get. And research shows that they would be years largely free of chronic disease, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. We think the best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world that are actually experiencing them, areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than we are, areas where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years, the rate of middle age mortality is a fraction of what it is in this country. We found our first Blue Zone about 125 miles off the coast of Italy, on the island of Sardinia. And not the entire island, the island is about 1.4 million people, but only up in the highlands, an area called the Nuoro province. And here we have this area where men live the longest, about 10 times more centenarians than we have here in America. And this is a place where people not only reach age 100, they do so with extraordinary vigor. Places where 102 year olds still ride their bike to work, chop wood, and can beat a guy 60 years younger than them. (Laughter) Their history actually goes back to about the time of Christ. It's actually a Bronze Age culture that's been isolated. Because the land is so infertile, they largely are shepherds, which occasions regular, low-intensity physical activity. Their diet is mostly plant-based, accentuated with foods that they can carry into the fields. They came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat, a type of cheese made from grass-fed animals so the cheese is high in Omega-3 fatty acids instead of Omega-6 fatty acids from corn-fed animals, and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world. It's called Cannonau. But the real secret I think lies more in the way that they organize their society. And one of the most salient elements of the Sardinian society is how they treat older people. You ever notice here in America, social equity seems to peak at about age 24? Just look at the advertisements. Here in Sardinia, the older you get the more equity you have, the more wisdom you're celebrated for. You go into the bars in Sardinia, instead of seeing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, you see the centenarian of the month calendar. This, as it turns out, is not only good for your aging parents to keep them close to the family — it imparts about four to six years of extra life expectancy — research shows it's also good for the children of those families, who have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease. That's called the grandmother effect. We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet, about 800 miles south of Tokyo, on the archipelago of Okinawa. Okinawa is actually 161 small islands. And in the northern part of the main island, this is ground zero for world longevity. This is a place where the oldest living female population is found. It's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. They have what we want. They live a long time, and tend to die in their sleep, very quickly, and often, I can tell you, after sex. They live about seven good years longer than the average American. Five times as many centenarians as we have in America. One fifth the rate of colon and breast cancer, big killers here in America. And one sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease. And the fact that this culture has yielded these numbers suggests strongly they have something to teach us. What do they do? Once again, a plant-based diet, full of vegetables with lots of color in them. And they eat about eight times as much tofu as Americans do. More significant than what they eat is how they eat it. They have all kinds of little strategies to keep from overeating, which, as you know, is a big problem here in America. A few of the strategies we observed: they eat off of smaller plates, so they tend to eat fewer calories at every sitting. Instead of serving family style, where you can sort of mindlessly eat as you're talking, they serve at the counter, put the food away, and then bring it to the table. They also have a 3,000-year-old adage, which I think is the greatest sort of diet suggestion ever invented. It was invented by Confucius. And that diet is known as the Hara, Hatchi, Bu diet. It's simply a little saying these people say before their meal to remind them to stop eating when their stomach is [80] percent full. It takes about a half hour for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain. And by remembering to stop at 80 percent it helps keep you from doing that very thing. But, like Sardinia, Okinawa has a few social constructs that we can associate with longevity. We know that isolation kills. Fifteen years ago, the average American had three good friends. We're down to one and half right now. If you were lucky enough to be born in Okinawa, you were born into a system where you automatically have a half a dozen friends with whom you travel through life. They call it a Moai. And if you're in a Moai you're expected to share the bounty if you encounter luck, and if things go bad, child gets sick, parent dies, you always have somebody who has your back. This particular Moai, these five ladies have been together for 97 years. Their average age is 102. Typically in America we've divided our adult life up into two sections. There is our work life, where we're productive. And then one day, boom, we retire. And typically that has meant retiring to the easy chair, or going down to Arizona to play golf. In the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. Instead there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is "ikigai." And, roughly translated, it means "the reason for which you wake up in the morning." For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art. For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week. And this is a question. The National Institute on Aging actually gave us a questionnaire to give these centenarians. And one of the questions, they were very culturally astute, the people who put the questionnaire. One of the questions was, "What is your ikigai?" They instantly knew why they woke up in the morning. For this 102 year old woman, her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter. Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years. And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great-great-great-granddaughter. And she put her head back and she said, "It feels like leaping into heaven." I thought that was a wonderful thought. My editor at Geographic wanted me to find America's Blue Zone. And for a while we looked on the prairies of Minnesota, where actually there is a very high proportion of centenarians. But that's because all the young people left. (Laughter) So, we turned to the data again. And we found America's longest-lived population among the Seventh-Day Adventists concentrated in and around Loma Linda, California. Adventists are conservative Methodists. They celebrate their Sabbath from sunset on Friday till sunset on Saturday. A "24-hour sanctuary in time," they call it. And they follow five little habits that conveys to them extraordinary longevity, comparatively speaking. In America here, life expectancy for the average woman is 80. But for an Adventist woman, their life expectancy is 89. And the difference is even more pronounced among men, who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts. Now, this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years. Sterling study. And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project. This is a heterogeneous community. It's white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The only thing that they have in common are a set of very small lifestyle habits that they follow ritualistically for most of their lives. They take their diet directly from the Bible. Genesis: Chapter one, Verse [29], where God talks about legumes and seeds, and on one more stanza about green plants, ostensibly missing is meat. They take this sanctuary in time very serious. For 24 hours every week, no matter how busy they are, how stressed out they are at work, where the kids need to be driven, they stop everything and they focus on their God, their social network, and then, hardwired right in the religion, are nature walks. And the power of this is not that it's done occasionally, the power is it's done every week for a lifetime. None of it's hard. None of it costs money. Adventists also tend to hang out with other Adventists. So, if you go to an Adventist's party you don't see people swilling Jim Beam or rolling a joint. Instead they're talking about their next nature walk, exchanging recipes, and yes, they pray. But they influence each other in profound and measurable ways. This is a culture that has yielded Ellsworth Whareham. Ellsworth Whareham is 97 years old. He's a multimillionaire, yet when a contractor wanted 6,000 dollars to build a privacy fence, he said, "For that kind of money I'll do it myself." So for the next three days he was out shoveling cement, and hauling poles around. And predictably, perhaps, on the fourth day he ended up in the operating room. But not as the guy on the table; the guy doing open-heart surgery. At 97 he still does 20 open-heart surgeries every month. Ed Rawlings, 103 years old now, an active cowboy, starts his morning with a swim. And on weekends he likes to put on the boards, throw up rooster tails. And then Marge Deton. Marge is 104. Her grandson actually lives in the Twin Cities here. She starts her day with lifting weights. She rides her bicycle. And then she gets in her root-beer colored 1994 Cadillac Seville, and tears down the San Bernardino freeway, where she still volunteers for seven different organizations. I've been on 19 hardcore expeditions. I'm probably the only person you'll ever meet who rode his bicycle across the Sahara desert without sunscreen. But I'll tell you, there is no adventure more harrowing than riding shotgun with Marge Deton. "A stranger is a friend I haven't met yet!" she'd say to me. So, what are the common denominators in these three cultures? What are the things that they all do? And we managed to boil it down to nine. In fact we've done two more Blue Zone expeditions since this and these common denominators hold true. And the first one, and I'm about to utter a heresy here, none of them exercise, at least the way we think of exercise. Instead, they set up their lives so that they are constantly nudged into physical activity. These 100-year-old Okinawan women are getting up and down off the ground, they sit on the floor, 30 or 40 times a day. Sardinians live in vertical houses, up and down the stairs. Every trip to the store, or to church or to a friend's house occasions a walk. They don't have any conveniences. There is not a button to push to do yard work or house work. If they want to mix up a cake, they're doing it by hand. That's physical activity. That burns calories just as much as going on the treadmill does. When they do do intentional physical activity, it's the things they enjoy. They tend to walk, the only proven way to stave off cognitive decline, and they all tend to have a garden. They know how to set up their life in the right way so they have the right outlook. Each of these cultures take time to downshift. The Sardinians pray. The Seventh-Day Adventists pray. The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration. But when you're in a hurry or stressed out, that triggers something called the inflammatory response, which is associated with everything from Alzheimer's disease to cardiovascular disease. When you slow down for 15 minutes a day you turn that inflammatory state into a more anti-inflammatory state. They have vocabulary for sense of purpose, ikigai, like the Okinawans. You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you're born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate in their life, that's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy. There's no longevity diet. Instead, these people drink a little bit every day, not a hard sell to the American population. (Laughter) They tend to eat a plant-based diet. Doesn't mean they don't eat meat, but lots of beans and nuts. And they have strategies to keep from overeating, little things that nudge them away from the table at the right time. And then the foundation of all this is how they connect. They put their families first, take care of their children and their aging parents. They all tend to belong to a faith-based community, which is worth between four and 14 extra years of life expectancy if you do it four times a month. And the biggest thing here is they also belong to the right tribe. They were either born into or they proactively surrounded themselves with the right people. We know from the Framingham studies, that if your three best friends are obese there is a 50 percent better chance that you'll be overweight. So, if you hang out with unhealthy people, that's going to have a measurable impact over time. Instead, if your friend's idea of recreation is physical activity, bowling, or playing hockey, biking or gardening, if your friends drink a little, but not too much, and they eat right, and they're engaged, and they're trusting and trustworthy, that is going to have the biggest impact over time. Diets don't work. No diet in the history of the world has ever worked for more than two percent of the population. Exercise programs usually start in January; they're usually done by October. When it comes to longevity there is no short term fix in a pill or anything else. But when you think about it, your friends are long-term adventures, and therefore, perhaps the most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life, and life to your years. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The real danger lurking in the water

{0: 'Romulus Whitaker is a scientist and conservationist who slings around the globe to study and protect reptiles.'}

TEDIndia 2009

I want you to put off your preconceptions, your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles. Because that is the only way I'm going to get my story across to you. And by the way, if I come across as a sort of rabid, hippie conservationist, it's purely a figment of your imagination. (Laughter) Okay. We are actually the first species on Earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival. And I know we've all seen images enough to make us numb, of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet. We're kind of like greedy kids, using it all up, aren't we? And today is a time for me to talk to you about water. It's not only because we like to drink lots of it, and its marvelous derivatives, beer, wine, etc. And, of course, watch it fall from the sky and flow in our wonderful rivers, but for several other reasons as well. When I was a kid, growing up in New York, I was smitten by snakes, the same way most kids are smitten by tops, marbles, cars, trains, cricket balls. And my mother, brave lady, was partly to blame, taking me to the New York Natural History Museum, buying me books on snakes, and then starting this infamous career of mine, which has culminated in of course, arriving in India 60 years ago, brought by my mother, Doris Norden, and my stepfather, Rama Chattopadhyaya. It's been a roller coaster ride. Two animals, two iconic reptiles really captivated me very early on. One of them was the remarkable gharial. This crocodile, which grows to almost 20 feet long in the northern rivers, and this charismatic snake, the king cobra. What my purpose of the talk today really is, is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures. Because this is what you will take away from here, a reconnection with nature, I hope. The king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons. What you're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here, of a female king cobra making her nest. Here is a limbless animal, capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves, and then laying her eggs inside, to withstand 5 to 10 [meters of rainfall], in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days, and hatch into little baby king cobras. So, she protects her eggs, and after three months, the babies finally do hatch out. A majority of them will die, of course. There is very high mortality in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long. My first experience with king cobras was in '72 at a magical place called Agumbe, in Karnataka, this state. And it is a marvelous rain forest. This first encounter was kind of like the Maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior. It really changed my life totally. And it brought me straight into the conservation fray. I ended up starting this research and education station in Agumbe, which you are all of course invited to visit. This is basically a base wherein we are trying to gather and learn virtually everything about the biodiversity of this incredibly complex forest system, and try to hang on to what's there, make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean, and of course, having a good time too. You can almost hear the drums throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we're there. It was very important for us to get through to the people. And through the children is usually the way to go. They are fascinated with snakes. They haven't got that steely thing that you end up either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way. They are interested. And it really works to start with them. This gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes. This is an average size king cobra, about 12 feet long. And it actually crawled into somebody's bathroom, and was hanging around there for two or three days. The people of this part of India worship the king cobra. And they didn't kill it. They called us to catch it. Now we've caught more than 100 king cobras over the last three years, and relocated them in nearby forests. But in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures [it was necessary] for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside [each] snake. Now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets, where the babies go after they hatch, and remarkable things like this you're about to see. This was just a few days ago in Agumbe. I had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper. And it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself. And king cobras feed only on snakes. This [little snake] was kind of a tid-bit for it, what we'd call a "vadai" or a donut or something like that. (Laughter) Usually they eat something a bit larger. In this case a rather strange and inexplicable activity happened over the last breeding season, wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra, didn't mate with it, actually killed it and swallowed it. We're still trying to explain and come to terms with what is the evolutionary advantage of this. But they do also a lot of other remarkable things. This is again, something [we were able to see] by virtue of the fact that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes. This male snake, 12 feet long, met another male king cobra. And they did this incredible ritual combat dance. It's very much like the rutting of mammals, including humans, you know, sorting out our differences, but gentler, no biting allowed. It's just a wresting match, but a remarkable activity. Now, what are we doing with all this information? What's the point of all this? Well, the king cobra is literally a keystone species in these rainforests. And our job is to convince the authorities that these forests have to be protected. And this is one of the ways we do it, by learning as much as we can about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there, in order to help protect trees, animals and of course the water sources. You've all heard, perhaps, of Project Tiger which started back in the early '70s, which was, in fact, a very dynamic time for conservation. We were piloted, I could say, by a highly autocratic stateswoman, but who also had an incredible passion for environment. And this is the time when Project Tiger emerged. And, just like Project Tiger, our activities with the king cobra is to look at a species of animal so that we protect its habitat and everything within it. So, the tiger is the icon. And now the king cobra is a new one. All the major rivers in south India are sourced in the Western Ghats, the chain of hills running along the west coast of India. It pours out millions of gallons every hour, and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people, and washes many, many babies, and of course feeds many, many animals, both domestic and wild, produces thousands of tons of rice. And what do we do? How do we respond to this? Well, basically, we dam it, we pollute it, we pour in pesticides, weedicides, fungicides. You drink it in peril of your life. And the thing is, it's not just big industry. It's not misguided river engineers who are doing all this; it's us. It seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage are in water sources. Okay. Now we're going north, very far north. North central India, the Chambal River is where we have our base. This is the home of the gharial, this incredible crocodile. It is an animal which has been on the Earth for just about 100 million years. It survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off. It has remarkable features. Even though it grows to 20 feet long, since it eats only fish it's not dangerous to human beings. It does have big teeth, however, and it's kind of hard to convince people if an animal has big teeth, that it's a harmless creature. But we, actually, back in the early '70s, did surveys, and found that gharial were extremely rare. In fact, if you see the map, the range of their original habitat was all the way from the Indus in Pakistan to the Irrawaddy in Burma. And now it's just limited to a couple of spots in Nepal and India. So, in fact at this point there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild. So, starting in the mid-'70s when conservation was at the fore, we were actually able to start projects which were basically government supported to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests and release 5,000 baby gharial back to the wild. And pretty soon we were seeing sights like this. I mean, just incredible to see bunches of gharial basking on the river again. But complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt. And, sure enough, with all the other pressures on the river, like sand mining, for example, very, very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river's edge, not allowing the animals to breed anymore, we're looking at even more problems building up for the gharial, despite the early good intentions. Their nests hatching along the riverside producing hundreds of hatchlings. It's just an amazing sight. This was actually just taken last year. But then the monsoon arrives, and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or there is always a barrage, and, shoop, they get washed down to their doom. Luckily there is still a lot of interest. My pals in the Crocodile Specialist Group of the IUCN, the [Madras Crocodile Bank], an NGO, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Institute of India, State Forest Departments, and the Ministry of Environment, we all work together on stuff. But it's possibly, and definitely not enough. For example, in the winter of 2007 and 2008, there was this incredible die-off of gharial, in the Chambal River. Suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river, dead. Why? How could it happen? This is a relatively clean river. The Chambal, if you look at it, has clear water. People scoop water out of the Chambal and drink it, something you wouldn't do in most north Indian rivers. So, in order to try to find out the answer to this, we got veterinarians from all over the world working with Indian vets to try to figure out what was happening. I was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside. And we actually looked through all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on. And it came down to something called gout, which, as a result of kidney breakdown is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body, and worse in the joints, which made the gharial unable to swim. And it's a horribly painful death. Just downriver from the Chambal is the filthy Yamuna river, the sacred Yamuna river. And I hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it but it's the truth. It's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine. It flows down through Delhi, Mathura, Agra, and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine. So, it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial was something in the food chain, something in the fish they were eating. And, you know, once a toxin is in the food chain everything is affected, including us. Because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course. In order to try to answer some of these questions, we again turn to technology, to biological technology, in this case, again, telemetry, putting radios on 10 gharial, and actually following their movements. They're being watched everyday as we speak, to try to find out what this mysterious toxin is. The Chambal river is an absolutely incredible place. It's a place that's famous to a lot of you who know about the bandits, the dacoits who used to work up there. And there still are quite a few around. But Poolan Devi was one [of them]. Which actually Shekhar Kapur made an incredible movie, "The Bandit Queen," which I urge you to see. You'll get to see the incredible [Chambal] landscape as well. But, again, heavy fishing pressures. This is one of the last repositories of the Ganges river dolphin, various species of turtles, thousands of migratory birds, and fishing is causing problems like this. And now [these] new elements of human intolerance for river creatures like the gharial means that if they don't drown in the net, then they simply cut their beaks off. Animals like the Ganges river dolphin which is just down to a few left, and it is also critically endangered. So, who is next? Us? Because we are all dependent on these water sources. So, we all know about the Narmada river, the tragedies of dams, the tragedies of huge projects which displace people and wreck river systems without providing livelihoods. And development just basically going berserk, for a double figure growth index, basically. So, we're not sure where this story is going to end, whether it's got a happy or sad ending. And climate change is certainly going to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads. We're still working hard at it. We've got a lot of a good team of people working up there. And the thing is, you know, the decision makers, the folks in power, they're up in their bungalows and so on in Delhi, in the city capitals. They are all supplied with plenty of water. It's cool. But out on the rivers there are still millions of people who are in really bad shape. And it's a bleak future for them. So, we have our Ganges and Yamuna cleanup project. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and nothing to show for it. Incredible. So, people talk about political will. During the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action. Government cut through all the red tape, we got foreign vets on it. It was great. So, we can do it. But if you stroll down to the Yamuna or to the Gomati in Lucknow, or to the Adyar river in Chennai, or the Mula-Mutha river in Pune, just see what we're capable of doing to a river. It's sad. But I think the final note really is that we can do it. The corporates, the artists, the wildlife nuts, the good old everyday folks can actually bring these rivers back. And the final word is that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders. And there is a gharial looking at us from the river. And these are powerful water totems. And they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing. Namaste. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks, Rom. Thanks a lot. You know, most people are terrified of snakes. And there might be quite a few people here who would be very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust. Do you have those conversations with people? How do you really get them to care? Romulus Whitaker: I take the sort of humble approach, I guess you could say. I don't say that snakes are huggable exactly. It's not like the teddy bear. But I sort of — there is an innocence in these animals. And when the average person looks at a cobra going "Ssssss!" like that, they say, "My god, look at that angry, dangerous creature." I look at it as a creature who is totally frightened of something so dangerous as a human being. And that is the truth. And that's what I try to get out. (Applause) CA: Now, incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed. You were saying that that hasn't been filmed before. RW: Yes, this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it, for one thing. As I said, it's just like a little snack for him, you know? Usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes, or even cobras. But this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle. Whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface, you know, the plantations, to find big rat snakes and stuff. This guy specializes in pit vipers. And the guy who is working there with them, he's from Maharashtra, he said, "I think he's after the nusha." (Laughter) Now, the nusha means the high. Whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush. (Laughter) CA: Thanks Rom. Thank you. (Applause)

An all-star set

{0: 'Herbie Hancock is an iconic jazz musician, known as much for his mastery of the traditional as he is for entirely changing the game. '}

TED2009

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Applause) Herbie Hancock: Thank you. Marcus Miller. (Applause) Harvey Mason. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

How we rescued the "dancing bears"

{0: 'Kartick Satyanarayan works tirelessly to save India’s wild animals from illegal captivity and poaching -- most notably rescuing hundreds of “dancing” bears. '}

TEDIndia 2009

Hi. For those of you who haven't seen dancing bears, these are the dancing bears. In 1995, we started working on a two-year investigative research project to try and find out what was going on. Because the sloth bears in the wild were obviously getting depleted because of this. This is the Qalandar community. They are a marginalized Islamic community who live across India, and have been in India since the 13th century. We went about getting evidence of what was going on. And this is footage from a hidden camera in a button. And we went in, pretending to be buyers. And we found this right in this very state, in Karnataka. And the bear cubs were being harvested from across the country and being sold and traded. These were being sold for about 2,000 dollars each, and they are used for bear paw soup, and also being trained, later on, to become dancing bears like the one you just saw. Sadly, the family of Qalandars depended on this bear. The couple are barely 18 years old. They already have four children beside them. You can see them. And the economy of the family and their livelihood depended on those animals. So, we had to deal with it in a very practical and sustainable manner. Now, when we started working deeper and digging deeper, we found that it's an illegal act. These guys could go to jail for up to seven years if they were caught by authorities. And what they were doing to the bears was really appalling. It was unacceptable. The mother bears are usually killed. The cubs, which are taken, are separated. Their teeth are basically bashed out with a metal rod. And they use a red hot iron needle to make a hole through the muzzle. Now we had to start changing these people and converting them from using that for a livelihood, to getting something else. So, this is Bitu Qalandar, who was our first experiment. And we were so unsure that this would work. We weren't sure at all. And we managed to convince him. And we said, "Okay, here is some seed fund. Let's see if you can get something else." And we got the bear surrendered to — we set up a sanctuary. We have four sanctuaries in India. And now he sells cool drinks, he's by the highway. He has a telephone booth. And then it started, there was no turning back after that. This is Sadua who came and surrendered his bear. And now he runs a cattle fodder store and a grain store near Agra. Then there was no looking back at all for us. We gave cycle rickshaws. We set up carpet-weaving units, vocational training for the women. The women were just not allowed to come out of the community and work with mainstream society. So, we were able to address that. Education. The kids never went to school. They only had Islamic education, very little of it. And they were never allowed to go to school because they were an extra earning hand at home. So we managed to get education. So, we sponsor 600 children education programs today. We were able to ensure brighter futures for these people. Of course we also had to get the bears in. This is what happens to the bears when they come in. And this is what we turn them into. We have a veterinary facility in our rescue centers. So, basically in 2002 there were 1,200 dancing bears. We rescued over 550 dancing bears. We've been able to ensure better futures for the people and the bears. The big news that I want to announce today is that next month we will be bringing in the very last bear of India, into our rescue center. (Applause) And India will no longer have to witness this cruel barbaric practice which has been here for centuries. And the people can hold their heads up high. And the Qalandar people will rise above all this cruel barbaric past that they've lived all their lives. And the beautiful bears can of course live in the wild again. And there will be no more removing of these bears. And the children, both humans and bear cubs can live peacefully. Thank you. (Applause)

Kids, take charge

{0: 'The founder of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, Kiran Sethi has launched an initiative to make our cities more child-friendly.'}

TEDIndia 2009

Contagious is a good word. Even in the times of H1N1, I like the word. Laughter is contagious. Passion is contagious. Inspiration is contagious. We've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers. But for me, what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something I call the "I Can" bug. So, the question is, why only them? In a country of a billion people and some, why so few? Is it luck? Is it chance? Can we all not systematically and consciously get infected? So, in the next eight minutes I would like to share with you my story. I got infected when I was 17, when, as a student of the design college, I encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas, challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me. And I was struck by just how wonderful it felt, and how contagious that feeling was. I also realized I should have got infected when I was seven. So, when I started Riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab, a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the "I Can" bug. And I uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context, that if you blur the boundaries between school and life, then children go through a journey of "aware," where they can see the change, "enable," be changed, and then "empower," lead the change. And that directly increased student wellbeing. Children became more competent, and less helpless. But this was all common sense. So, I'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at Riverside. A little background: when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer. It transformed them. What you will see is their journey, and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world. (Music) That's them rolling. And in two hours, after their backs were broke, they were changed. And once that happened, they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished. And look at Ragav, that moment when his face changes because he's been able to understand that he has shifted that man's mindset. And that can't happen in a classroom. So, when Ragav experienced that he went from "teacher told me," to "I am doing it." And that's the "I Can" mindshift. And it is a process that can be energized and nurtured. But we had parents who said, "Okay, making our children good human beings is all very well, but what about math and science and English? Show us the grades." And we did. The data was conclusive. When children are empowered, not only do they do good, they do well, in fact very well, as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in India, Riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in India in math, English and science. So, it worked. It was now time to take it outside Riverside. So, on August 15th, Independence Day, 2007, the children of Riverside set out to infect Ahmedabad. Now it was not about Riverside school. It was about all children. So, we were shameless. We walked into the offices of the municipal corporation, the police, the press, businesses, and basically said, "When are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child? When will you include the child in the city? Basically, open your hearts and your minds to the child." So, how did the city respond? Since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood. Here was a city telling its child, "You can." A glimpse of infection in Ahmedabad. Video: [Unclear] So, the busiest streets closed down. We have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us. It gets taken over by children. They are skating. They are doing street plays. They are playing, all free, for all children. (Music) Atul Karwal: aProCh is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier. And we plan to extend this to other parts of the city. (Music) Kiran Bir Sethi: And the city will give free time. And Ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world. Geet Sethi: When a city gives to the children, in the future the children will give back to the city. (Music) KBS: And because of that, Ahmedabad is known as India's first child-friendly city. So, you're getting the pattern. First 200 children at Riverside. Then 30,000 children in Ahmedabad, and growing. It was time now to infect India. So, on August 15th, again, Independence Day, 2009, empowered with the same process, we empowered 100,000 children to say, "I can." How? We designed a simple toolkit, converted it into eight languages, and reached 32,000 schools. We basically gave children a very simple challenge. We said, take one idea, anything that bothers you, choose one week, and change a billion lives. And they did. Stories of change poured in from all over India, from Nagaland in the east, to Jhunjhunu in the west, from Sikkim in the north, to Krishnagiri in the south. Children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems. Right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism, and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in Rajasthan. I mean, it was incredible. Basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say, "You can," then they will. Infection in India. This is in Rajasthan, a rural village. Child: Our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write. KBS: First time, a rally and a street play in a rural school — unheard of — to tell their parents why literacy is important. Look at what their parents says. Man: This program is wonderful. We feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write. Woman: I am so happy that my students did this campaign. In the future, I will never doubt my students' abilities. See? They have done it. KBS: An inner city school in Hyderabad. Girl: 581. This house is 581 ... We have to start collecting from 555. KBS: Girls and boys in Hyderabad, going out, pretty difficult, but they did it. Woman: Even though they are so young, they have done such good work. First they have cleaned the society, then it will be Hyderabad, and soon India. Woman: It was a revelation for me. It doesn't strike me that they had so much inside them. Girl: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. For our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you, for a very good cause, the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids. Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! KBS: So, the charter of compassion starts right here. Street plays, auctions, petitions. I mean, they were changing lives. It was incredible. So, how can we still stay immune? How can we stay immune to that passion, that energy, that excitement? I know it's obvious, but I have to end with the most powerful symbol of change, Gandhiji. 70 years ago, it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of "We can." So, today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in India? Last I heard, the preamble still said, "We, the people of India," right? So, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? Like I said, contagious is a good word. Thank you. (Applause)

Making maps to fight disaster, build economies

{0: 'Lalitesh Katragadda builds tools that help groups of people compile information to build something greater than the sum of its parts. His latest fascination: collaborative maps.'}

TEDIndia 2009

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

All things are Moleeds

{0: "Best known as the voice of Roger Rabbit, Charles Fleischer's multi-decade career includes work on stage and on screen, and an online emporium of unusual observations called MonkeyDog."}

TED2005

I am going to be talking about secrets. Obviously the best way to divulge a secret is to tell someone to not say anything about it. (Laughter) Secrets. I'm using PowerPoint this year just because, you know, I'm into the TED thing. (Laughter) And when you use these things you don't have to go like that. You just press it. (Laughter) Oh, man. Um, yes. (Laughter) Yes. I'm sure! Just change it! (Laughter) Is Bill Gates here? Change it! Come on! What? (Laughter) Ah! Okay. That's not my slides, but it's okay. (Laughter) As you can see, these are all maps. And maps are important devices for transferring information, especially if you have human cognitive ability. We can see that all formulas are really maps. Now, as humans, we make maps of places that we seldom even go, which seems a little wasteful of time. This, of course, is a map of the moon. There're some very delightful names. Tranquilacalitis, [unclear]. My favorite is Frigoris. What are these people thinking? Frigoris? What the Frigoris you doing? Names are important. Frigoris? This is the Moon. People could live there one day. I'll meet you at Frigoris. No. I don't think so. (Laughter) There we see Mars, again with various names. And this is all done, by the way, by the International Astronomical Union. This is an actual group of people that sit around naming planetary objects. This is from their actual book. These are some of the names that they have chosen, ladies and gentlemen. I'll go through a little of them. Bolotnitsa. That, of course, is the Slavic swamp mermaid. (Laughter) Now I think the whole concept of a mermaid doesn't really blend into the swamp feel. (Laughter) "Oh look! Mermaid come out of swamp. Oh boy! It's time for Bolotnitsa!" (Laughter) Djabran Fluctus. If that don't flow off the tongue, what does? (Laughter) I mean kids are studying this stuff and they've got the word "fluctus" up there. That's wrong. (Laughter) One dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life. (Laughter) "It fluctus up, Mama." Hikuleo Fluctus. That's a little more flowing. Hikuleo sounds like a kind of a Leonardo DiCaprio 17 syllable thing. And that's the Tonga underworld. And one of my favorites is the Itoki Fluctus, who is the Nicaraguan goddess of insects, stars, and planets. Now, if you're a goddess of stars and planets wouldn't you relegate insects to somebody else? (Laughter) "No, no, really, I'm so busy with the stars. Would you mind taking the insects? Thank you darling. Oh take the spiders too. I know they're not insects, but I don't care. Monkeys, chimps, just get rid of the hairy creatures." (Laughter) Now, we're going to be going to Mars one day. And when we do, it's going to be unfair for the people that are living there to have to live with these ridiculous names. So, you'll be on Mars, and you're at Hellespointica Depressio which has got to be a really "up" place. (Laughter) Yeah, I'm at the Depressio, and I want to get over to Amazonis so I plug it into the Mars map, and click the button and there's my directions. I go to Chrysokeras. (Laughter) Left to the Thymiamata. Then to Niliacus Lacus, which is not a bad name. Niliacus Lacus, try to get the practice, slick-a-tick-a-bacus. That's a cool name. I will say that. So, I hold back a little of my venom for these astronomical misnomers. And then of course Arnon to Thoth. And of course there will be advertisements. This is from their rule book, the International Astronomical Union. And you know they're international because they put it "en Francais" as well. L'Union Astronomique Internationale, for those of you who don't speak French. I thought I'd translate for you. From the rulebook: Nomenclature is a tool. The first consideration, make it clear, simple and unambiguous. And I think that Djabran Fluctus, that fits that mode. (Laughter) That's simple, the goddess of goats, very simple. Djabran Fluctus. "Now, Frank is this clear to you, Djabran Fluctus?" "Yeah, that's the goat goddess right? The Abacazanian? (Laughter) It's clear to me." "Listen, I'm going back to the swamp mermaid. Can you call me in a little while?" (Laughter) Also, from the actual document I highlighted a part I thought may be of interest. Anyone can suggest changing a name. So, I look to you, fellow member of the Earth community. We've got to change this stuff up fast. So, these are actual names of people that work there. I did some more investigation. These are more people working for this group. And, as you can see, they don't use their first names. (Laughter) These are people naming planets, and they won't use their first names. Something is askew here. (Laughter) Is it because his name is really Jupiter Blunck? (Laughter) Is that Ganymede Andromeda Burba? (Laughter) Is that Mars Ya Marov? I don't know. But it's investigative material, no doubt. There are some mapping people who do use their names. Witness please, Eugene Shoemaker, who, diligently, from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies. Must have been a very interesting day in the Shoemaker house. "Mom, I want to make maps." "That's wonderful Eugene. You could make maps of Toronto." "No, I want to make maps of planets." "Yeah, go to your room." (Laughter) Martians, Venusians, Jovians. We have names for places where people don't exist. That seems a little silly to me. There are no Jovians. Getting back to my premise, I used stamps, by the way, because you don't have to pay anybody for the rights. (Laughter) (Applause) There is obviously Einstein, Niels Bohr, de Fermat's last theorem, and I'm not sure whether that's James Coburn or Richard Harris. (Laughter) It's definitely one of the two. I'm not really clear which one. But obviously the point is that numbers are maps. And within numbers, is there an underlying secret to the universe? That is the premise of this particular presentation. By the way, that's a natural picture of Saturn, no adjustments. I mean that's just beautiful. So beautiful that I will even give up a laugh to explain my love of this particular planet, and the day Saturday, named after it, wonderfully. So, formulas relate number to form. That's Euler, his formula was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory which is kind of cool, not that funny, but it is cool. (Laughter) He was also famous for having no body. (Laughter) Which a lot of you are like, "How did he figure that out?" He's got no body, no man, just a head floating high. Here comes Euler. (Laughter) And that's an icosahedron, which is one of the five sacred solids, very important shapes. You see the icosahedron again. The dodecahedron, it's dual. There is a dodecahedron which I had to do in my room last night. The five sacred solids, as you can see there. Which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads. (Laughter) Blue cheese, ranch, oil and vinegar, thousand islands and house. I suggest the house. The reality, now here is something important. What's important about this is these shapes are duals of each other. And you can see how the icosahedron withdraws into the dodecahedron and then they just merge into each other. So, the whole concept of branes in the universe, if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron this is a very good map of what could possibly be. And that is, of course, what we are here to talk about. What a coincidence! October 9th, in France, Jean-Pierre Luminet said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron, based on information that they got from this probe. This would be a normal wave pattern. But what they're seeing, way out there in the far reaches of the microwave background, is this kind of odd undulation. It doesn't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be. So, you can kind of get an idea from this extrapolating that back under this huge picture, so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like. And judging from this, it looks a little like a cheeseburger. (Laughter) So, I'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger. And for me, that's a win-win. Everybody goes, I'm happy. (Laughter) Better really hurry up. I just threw this in because as important as all of our intellectual abilities are, without heart and without love it's just — it's all meaningless. And that, to me, is really beautiful. (Laughter) Except for that creepy guy in the background. (Laughter) Getting back to the point of my particular presentation, Kepler, one of my great heroes, who realized that these five solids, which I spoke of earlier, were related somehow to the planets, but he couldn't prove it. It freaked him out. But it did lead to Newton discovering gravity. So, maps of things leading to organized understandings of the universe in which we emerge. Now this is Isaac from a Vietnamese stamp. (Laughter) I am not suggesting at all that my Vietnamese brothers and sisters could maybe use a little art class here and there. But ... (Laughter) that's not a good picture. (Laughter) Not a good picture. Now, my friends in the island of Nevis are a little better. Look at that! That's Isaac Newton. That guy is rockin'. (Laughter) What a handsome cat. Once again, Nicaragua let me down. (Laughter) And Copernicus looks like Johnny Carson, which is really weird. (Laughter) I don't get that at all. Once again, these guys rock it out. Isaac is kickin' ass. Man, he looks like a rock star. This is freaky is a major way. This is Sierra Leone. They got little babies in there, floating in there. (Laughter) Man. I don't really need to comment on this. But I didn't know that Isaac Newton was in the Moody Blues. Did you? (Laughter) When did this happen? (Laughter) It's a different kind of course. And they've got five apples? I mean these guys are extrapolating in realms that are not necessarily valid. Although five is a good number, of course. Ecuador, my friend Kepler, as you can see, they call him Juan. (Laughter) Juan? No! Johannes, not Juan. It wasn't Carlos Chaplain. It's wrong. (Laughter) René Descartes, of course. Once again these Grenada people, this is like way too sick for anybody's imagination. He's all murky. There is little kids leaning on his leg, little ghosts flying around. We gotta clean this stuff up fast, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) This is, of course, the Cartesian coordinates. Once again, that's Sierra Leone. This is again, indicating how numbers relate to space relate to form, maps of the universe. Because that's why we're here, really, I think to figure stuff out and to love each other. Descartes. (Laughter) Before the horse. (Laughter) Now, Monaco took Descartes, and just flipped him around. Now, Monaco is problematic for me, and I'll show you why. Here is a map. All they have is a casino on it. (Laughter) And why Franklin Delano Roosevelt is on their map I don't even want to hazard a guess. But I'd say he'd been to Hellespointica Depressio recently. (Laughter) This is the flag of Monaco. Ladies and gentlemen, the flag of Indonesia. Please examine. (Laughter) (Applause) Not sure how this came to be, but it's not right. In Monaco, "No, what are you talking about? They are so different. Look, ours is more red, it's longer. They stole our flag! They stole our flag!" (Laughter) Bode's law wasn't even his law. It was a guy named Titus. And the reason I just bring this up because it is a law that doesn't really work. That's Jude Law and some of his films recently didn't work. (Laughter) Just a correlation that indicates how things are misinterpreted. And I wonder if the photographer said, "Okay, Jude, could you touch your tooth? That's good." Just a tip, if you're being photographed for press pictures, don't touch your teeth. (Laughter) Prime numbers, Gauss, one of my favorites. Golden section, I've been obsessed with this thing since before I was born. I know that scares a lot of you, but that was my purpose entirely. There we can see Fibonacci numbers related to the Golden Section, because Fibonacci and Golden Section relate to the unfolding of the measured meter of matter, as I refer to it. If Fibonacci had been on Paxil, (Laughter) that would be the Fibonacci series. "Ten milligram, 20 milligram." "Leonardo, dinner's ready, put down those books and take your pills." "Yes, Mama." (Laughter) Alright where is this going? That's a good question. Here is the premise that I began 27 years ago. If numbers can express the laws of this incredible universe that we live, I reason, through some sort of reverse engineering, we could extrapolate from them some basic structural element of this universe. And that's what I did. Twenty-seven years ago I started working on this. And I tried to build a particle accelerator. (Laughter) And that didn't work out well. So, then I thought a calculator is a metaphor. I can just divide numbers, that's like atom smashing. That's what I did. That's how I found Moleeds. Moleeds are what I believe the thing that will allow string theory to be proved. They are the nodes on the string, patterns and relationships, 27, 37. That was the first chart I came up with. You can see, even if you don't go for the numbers, the beauty of the symmetry. The numbers from one to 36, divided into six groups. Symmetry, pairs. Every top adds up to 37. Bottom, all 74. There is so many intricate relationships that I'm not going to go there now, because you would say, "Hey, go back to the Fluctus part." (Laughter) Circle of Fifths, acoustic harmony, geometric symmetry. I knew those two were related. Once again, the Cartesian kind of cross-over. So, I said if I'm going to put a circle, see what kind of patterns I get, boom, the Red System. Look at that. You can't just make this stuff up, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) You can't just go around going, "Oh, I'm going to put some triangles in a circle and they're going to be symmetrical. And they're all going to add up, and it's going to be, oh yeah, I figured that out." This is beyond anything anybody could just make up. There is the Orange System. (Laughter) And you'll see over here, these are multiples of the number 27. And they recapitulate that shape, even though that's a circle of nine and that's a circle of 36. It's nuts. (Laughter) That's the Green System. It all folds in half on the Green System, right between 18 and 19. The Blue System. The Violet. It's all there. (Laughter) Look at that! I mean you cannot make that stuff up. (Laughter) That just doesn't fall out of a tree, ladies and gentlemen. Twenty-seven years of my life! (Laughter) And I'm presenting it here at TED. Why? Because this is the place if aliens land, I hope they come here. (Laughter) "We are going to destroy the Earth. Hmmm ... maybe not." (Laughter) In this last year I have found these subsequent systems which allow for the mathematic possibilities of the Calabi-Yau manifolds in a way that doesn't necessitate these little hidden dimensions. Which works mathematically, but it just doesn't seem God-like to me. It just seems like it's not sexy and elegant, it's hidden. I don't want hidden, I want to see it. (Laughter) I found other pairs all have symmetry, even though, unlike the master one, their symmetry is split. Unbelievable. This is like crazy. Am I the only one that sees this? (Laughter) You know, I didn't just draw this in a day, by the way. You know, try making some charts like this at home. You gotta be accurate! There's measurement involved, increments. These are maps, by the way. Not stamps, but one day. (Laughter) Okay, I'm getting to the punch. Golden Ratio, it's crazy. And look at this, built within it is the Golden Ratio. I start looking at that, and look at them again. They start looking like planets. I go to JPL. I look at the orbits of the planets. I find 18 examples of it in our solar system. I never told anybody. This is the first thing. This could be history. (Laughter) Kepler was right. (Laughter) Eighteen and 19, the middle of the Moleeds, 0.618 is the golden section. Multiply them together, 18.618 x 19.618 is 365.247. Which is .005 different from the number of days in a year. Hey, you can't make this up. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

How I held my breath for 17 minutes

{0: 'With a deck of cards and authoritative cool, David Blaine brings the wonderment of magic off the stage and onto the sidewalk.'}

TEDMED 2009

As a magician, I try to create images that make people stop and think. I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible. I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin, buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999, for a week. I lived there with nothing but water. And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things. The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. That one was way more difficult than I had expected. The one after that, I stood on top of a hundred-foot pillar for 36 hours. I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads. So, next I went to London. In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water. It was, for me, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done, but it was also the most beautiful. There was so many skeptics, especially the press in London, that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me. (Laughter) So, I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science. My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing, like how long I could survive with nothing, not even air. I didn't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life. As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges. So, I began, early on, competing against the other kids, seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, while I stayed under on one breath. By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds. I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record. In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river. He was underneath, not breathing for 45 minutes. When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage. His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees. As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others. I started to think, if the boy could survive without breathing for that long, there must be a way that I could do it. So, I met with a top neurosurgeon. And I asked him, how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air? And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage. So, I took that as a challenge, basically. (Laughter) My first try, I figured that I could do something similar, and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water. And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop. And I was shivering. In my first attempt to hold my breath, I couldn't even last a minute. So, I realized that was completely not going to work. I went to talk to a doctor friend — and I asked him, "How could I do that?" "I want to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?" And he said, "David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier." (Laughter) So, he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber, which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it, that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me. This is a little hard to watch. But this is that attempt. So, that clearly wasn't going to work. (Laughter) Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing. There is a chemical that's called perflubron. And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it. So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it, and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which was really impossible. It's basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor said, while having an elephant standing on your chest. So, that idea disappeared. Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart/lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery, and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood? Which was another insane idea, obviously. Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas: to actually do it. (Laughter) To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead. So, I started researching into pearl divers. You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath. And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving. It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered, pretty much. There is many different aspects to free-diving. There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can. And then there is static apnea. That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving. That was the one that I studied. The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy. And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood. So, I learned never to move. And I learned how to slow my heart rate down. I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that. And then I learned how to purge. Purging is basically hyperventilating. You blow in and out — (Breathing loudly) You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling. And you're really ridding your body of CO2. So, when you hold your breath, it's infinitely easier. Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath, and just hold and relax and never let any air out, and just hold and relax through all the pain. Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for, out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes. So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute. And I would hold, immediately after, for five and a half minutes. Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can, then immediately after that I would hold again for five and a half minutes. I would repeat this process eight times in a row. Out of 52 minutes, you're only breathing for eight minutes. At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain. You feel like you're walking around in a daze. And you have these awful headaches. Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff. I started learning about the world-record holder. His name is Tom Sietas. And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath. He's six foot four. He's 160 pounds. And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person. I'm six foot one, and fat. We'll say big-boned. (Laughter) I had to drop 50 pounds in three months. So, everything that I put into my body, I considered as medicine. Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value. I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day. And I started to really adapt my body. [Individual results may vary] (Laughter) The thinner I was, the longer I was able to hold my breath. And by eating so well and training so hard, my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute. Which is lower than most Olympic athletes. In four months of training, I was able to hold my breath for over seven minutes. I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere. I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress. (Laughter) I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television. The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds, held by Tom Sietas, that guy with the whale lungs I told you about. I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating, I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it. I was completely wrong. I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air date. And I thought everything seemed to be on track. Two days before my big breath-hold attempt, for the record, the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath, and almost drowning, is too boring for television. (Laughter) So, I had to add handcuffs, while holding my breath, to escape from. This was a critical mistake. Because of the movement, I was wasting oxygen. And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions. By 7:08, I started to black out. And by seven minutes and 30 seconds, they had to pull my body out and bring me back. I had failed on every level. (Laughter) So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah. (Laughter) I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had. This was a different record. This was a pure O2 static apnea record that Guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes. So, basically you breathe pure O2 first, oxygenating your body, flushing out CO2, and you are able to hold much longer. I realized that my real competition was the beaver. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) In January of '08, Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train. So, I would sleep in a hypoxic tent every night. A hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet. So, it's like base camp, Everest. What that does is, you start building up the red bloodcell count in your body, which helps you carry oxygen better. Every morning, again, after getting out of that tent, your brain is completely wiped out. My first attempt on pure O2, I was able to go up to 15 minutes. So, it was a pretty big success. The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind, at 15 minutes your brain is done, you're brain dead. So, he pulled me up, and I was fine. There was one person there that was definitely not impressed. It was my ex-girlfriend. While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time, she was sifting through my Blackberry, checking all my messages. (Laughter) My brother had a picture of it. It is really — (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas' record, publicly. And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly, and broke his old record. Then his main competitor went out and broke his record. So, he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds. Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared. It was longer than the record. I wanted to get the Science Times to document this. I wanted to get them to do a piece on it. So, I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do. I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody. (Laughter) So, I don't know if it was the magic or the lure of the Cayman Islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding. While he was there, I tried to impress him, of course. And I did a dive down to 160 feet, which is basically the height of a 16 story building, and as I was coming up, I blacked out underwater, which is really dangerous; that's how you drown. Luckily, Kirk had seen me and he swam over and pulled me up. So, I started full focus. I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do. But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah. But in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool. But for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face, basically. The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up. So, I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me. That made me extremely nervous, raising the heart rate. Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor. And it was right next to the sphere. So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know, the ticking, really loud. Which was making me more nervous. And there was no way to slow my heart rate down. Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty unusual. (Laughter) This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down. I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down. I was just sitting there thinking, "I've got to slow this down. I'm going to fail." And I was getting more nervous. And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats. Basically it's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center. It was a waste of O2. When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this. There was no way for me to do it. I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing, if I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about how depressed I am. (Laughter) So, I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that. (Laughter) I kept pushing to 10 minutes. At 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes. And I knew that that was blood shunting, when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs. At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange. At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arm going numb. And I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack. So, I started to really get really paranoid. Then at 13 minutes, maybe because of the hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. It was awful. (Laughter) At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart. And I started having ischemia to the heart. My heartbeat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again. It would skip a beat. It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this. And I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack. So, at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out, if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up. I was really nervous. I let my feet out, and I started floating to the top. And I didn't take my head out. But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop, just waiting. They had doctors with the "Pst," you know, sitting there waiting. And then suddenly I hear screaming. And I think that there is some weird thing — that I had died or something had happened. And then I realized that I had made it to 16:32. So, with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds. (Applause) (Applause ends) As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it, once again. I also didn't want anybody to question it. I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate. So, I get to New York City the next day, I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up to me he's like, "Yo, D!" I'm like "Yeah?" He said, "If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry?" I was like "What?" (Laughter) And that's my life. So — (Laughter) As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice, it's training, and it's — (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting, (Sobs) while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me, so, thank you. (Applause)

10 young Indian artists to watch

{0: 'As an emerging markets investor, Ravin Agrawal tries to predict the future, balancing economic, political and technological factors. '}

TEDIndia 2009

Right now is the most exciting time to see new Indian art. Contemporary artists in India are having a conversation with the world like never before. I thought it might be interesting, even for the many long-time collectors here with us at TED, local collectors, to have an outside view of 10 young Indian artists I wish everyone at TED to know. The first is Bharti Kher. The central motif of Bharti's practice is the ready-made store-bought bindi that untold millions of Indian women apply to their foreheads, every day, in an act closely associated with the institution of marriage. But originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world. Bharti seeks to liberate this everyday cliche, as she calls it, by exploding it into something spectacular. She also creates life-size fiberglass sculptures, often of animals, which she then completely covers in bindis, often with potent symbolism. She says she first got started with 10 packets of bindis, and then wondered what she could do with 10 thousand. Our next artist, Balasubramaniam, really stands at the crossroads of sculpture, painting and installation, working wonders with fiberglass. Since Bala himself will be speaking at TED I won't spend too much time on him here today, except to say that he really succeeds at making the invisible visible. Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh is known for her digital collages, using Indian comic books called amar chitra kathas as her primary source material. These comics are a fundamental way that children, especially in the diaspora, learn their religious and mythological folk tales. I, for one, was steeped in these. Chitra basically remixes and re-titles these iconic images to tease out some of the sexual and gender politics embedded in these deeply influential comics. And she uses this vocabulary in her installation work as well. Jitish Kallat successfully practices across photography, sculpture, painting and installation. As you can see, he's heavily influenced by graffiti and street art, and his home city of Mumbai is an ever-present element in his work. He really captures that sense of density and energy which really characterizes modern urban Bombay. He also creates phantasmagoric sculptures made of bones from cast resin. Here he envisions the carcass of an autorickshaw he once witnessed burning in a riot. This next artist, N.S. Harsha, actually has a studio right here in Mysore. He's putting a contemporary spin on the miniature tradition. He creates these fine, delicate images which he then repeats on a massive scale. He uses scale to more and more spectacular effect, whether on the roof of a temple in Singapore, or in his increasingly ambitious installation work, here with 192 functioning sewing machines, fabricating the flags of every member of the United Nations. Mumbai-based Dhruvi Acharya builds on her love of comic books and street art to comment on the roles and expectations of modern Indian women. She too mines the rich source material of amar chitra kathas, but in a very different way than Chitra Ganesh. In this particular work, she actually strips out the images and leaves the actual text to reveal something previously unseen, and provocative. Raqib Shaw is Kolkata-born, Kashmir-raised, and London-trained. He too is reinventing the miniature tradition. He creates these opulent tableaus inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, but also by the Kashmiri textiles of his youth. He actually applies metallic industrial paints to his work using porcupine quills to get this rich detailed effect. I'm kind of cheating with this next artist since Raqs Media Collective are really three artists working together. Raqs are probably the foremost practitioners of multimedia art in India today, working across photography, video and installation. They frequently explore themes of globalization and urbanization, and their home of Delhi is a frequent element in their work. Here, they invite the viewer to analyze a crime looking at evidence and clues embedded in five narratives on these five different screens, in which the city itself may have been the culprit. This next artist is probably the alpha male of contemporary Indian art, Subodh Gupta. He was first known for creating giant photo-realistic canvases, paintings of everyday objects, the stainless steel kitchen vessels and tiffin containers known to every Indian. He celebrates these local and mundane objects globally, and on a grander and grander scale, by incorporating them into ever more colossal sculptures and installations. And finally number 10, last and certainly not least, Ranjani Shettar, who lives and works here in the state of Karnataka, creates ethereal sculptures and installations that really marry the organic to the industrial, and brings, like Subodh, the local global. These are actually wires wrapped in muslin and steeped in vegetable dye. And she arranges them so that the viewer actually has to navigate through the space, and interact with the objects. And light and shadow are a very important part of her work. She also explores themes of consumerism, and the environment, such as in this work, where these basket-like objects look organic and woven, and are woven, but with the strips of steel, salvaged from cars that she found in a Bangalore junkyard. 10 artists, six minutes, I know that was a lot to take in. But I can only hope I've whet your appetite to go out and see and learn more about the amazing things that are happening in art in India today. Thank you very much for looking and listening. (Applause)

Growing new organs

{0: 'Anthony Atala asks, "Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?" His lab at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is doing just that -- engineering over 30 tissues and whole organs.'}

TEDMED 2009

This is actually a painting that hangs at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School. And it shows the first time an organ was ever transplanted. In the front, you see, actually, Joe Murray getting the patient ready for the transplant, while in the back room you see Hartwell Harrison, the Chief of Urology at Harvard, actually harvesting the kidney. The kidney was indeed the first organ ever to be transplanted to the human. That was back in 1954, 55 years ago. Yet we're still dealing with a lot of the same challenges as many decades ago. Certainly many advances, many lives saved. But we have a major shortage of organs. In the last decade the number of patients waiting for a transplant has doubled. While, at the same time, the actual number of transplants has remained almost entirely flat. That really has to do with our aging population. We're just getting older. Medicine is doing a better job of keeping us alive. But as we age, our organs tend to fail more. So, that's a challenge, not just for organs but also for tissues. Trying to replace pancreas, trying to replace nerves that can help us with Parkinson's. These are major issues. This is actually a very stunning statistic. Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement. So, what can we do about it? We've talked about stem cells tonight. That's a way to do it. But still ways to go to get stem cells into patients, in terms of actual therapies for organs. Wouldn't it be great if our bodies could regenerate? Wouldn't it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies, to actually heal ourselves? It's not really that foreign of a concept, actually; it happens on the Earth every day. This is actually a picture of a salamander. Salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate. You see here a little video. This is actually a limb injury in this salamander. And this is actually real photography, timed photography, showing how that limb regenerates in a period of days. You see the scar form. And that scar actually grows out a new limb. So, salamanders can do it. Why can't we? Why can't humans regenerate? Actually, we can regenerate. Your body has many organs and every single organ in your body has a cell population that's ready to take over at the time of injury. It happens every day. As you age, as you get older. Your bones regenerate every 10 years. Your skin regenerates every two weeks. So, your body is constantly regenerating. The challenge occurs when there is an injury. At the time of injury or disease, the body's first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body. It basically wants to fight off infection, and seal itself, whether it's organs inside your body, or your skin, the first reaction is for scar tissue to move in, to seal itself off from the outside. So, how can we harness that power? One of the ways that we do that is actually by using smart biomaterials. How does this work? Well, on the left side here you see a urethra which was injured. This is the channel that connects the bladder to the outside of the body. And you see that it is injured. We basically found out that you can use these smart biomaterials that you can actually use as a bridge. If you build that bridge, and you close off from the outside environment, then you can create that bridge, and cells that regenerate in your body, can then cross that bridge, and take that path. That's exactly what you see here. It's actually a smart biomaterial that we used, to actually treat this patient. This was an injured urethra on the left side. We used that biomaterial in the middle. And then, six months later on the right-hand side you see this reengineered urethra. Turns out your body can regenerate, but only for small distances. The maximum efficient distance for regeneration is only about one centimeter. So, we can use these smart biomaterials but only for about one centimeter to bridge those gaps. So, we do regenerate, but for limited distances. What do we do now, if you have injury for larger organs? What do we do when we have injuries for structures which are much larger than one centimeter? Then we can start to use cells. The strategy here, is if a patient comes in to us with a diseased or injured organ, you can take a very small piece of tissue from that organ, less than half the size of a postage stamp, you can then tease that tissue apart, and look at its basic components, the patient's own cells, you take those cells out, grow and expand those cells outside the body in large quantities, and then we then use scaffold materials. To the naked eye they look like a piece of your blouse, or your shirt, but actually these materials are fairly complex and they are designed to degrade once inside the body. It disintegrates a few months later. It's acting only as a cell delivery vehicle. It's bringing the cells into the body. It's allowing the cells to regenerate new tissue, and once the tissue is regenerated the scaffold goes away. And that's what we did for this piece of muscle. This is actually showing a piece of muscle and how we go through the structures to actually engineer the muscle. We take the cells, we expand them, we place the cells on the scaffold, and we then place the scaffold back into the patient. But actually, before placing the scaffold into the patient, we actually exercise it. We want to make sure that we condition this muscle, so that it knows what to do once we put it into the patient. That's what you're seeing here. You're seeing this muscle bio-reactor actually exercising the muscle back and forth. Okay. These are flat structures that we see here, the muscle. What about other structures? This is actually an engineered blood vessel. Very similar to what we just did, but a little bit more complex. Here we take a scaffold, and we basically — scaffold can be like a piece of paper here. And we can then tubularize this scaffold. And what we do is we, to make a blood vessel, same strategy. A blood vessel is made up of two different cell types. We take muscle cells, we paste, or coat the outside with these muscle cells, very much like baking a layer cake, if you will. You place the muscle cells on the outside. You place the vascular blood vessel lining cells on the inside. You now have your fully seeded scaffold. You're going to place this in an oven-like device. It has the same conditions as a human body, 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. You then exercise it, as what you saw on that tape. And on the right you actually see a carotid artery that was engineered. This is actually the artery that goes from your neck to your brain. And this is an X-ray showing you the patent, functional blood vessel. More complex structures such as blood vessels, urethras, which I showed you, they're definitely more complex because you're introducing two different cell types. But they are really acting mostly as conduits. You're allowing fluid or air to go through at steady states. They are not nearly as complex as hollow organs. Hollow organs have a much higher degree of complexity, because you're asking these organs to act on demand. So, the bladder is one such organ. Same strategy, we take a very small piece of the bladder, less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then tease the tissue apart into its two individual cell components, muscle, and these bladder specialized cells. We grow the cells outside the body in large quantities. It takes about four weeks to grow these cells from the organ. We then take a scaffold that we shape like a bladder. We coat the inside with these bladder lining cells. We coat the outside with these muscle cells. We place it back into this oven-like device. From the time you take that piece of tissue, six to eight weeks later you can put the organ right back into the patient. This actually shows the scaffold. The material is actually being coated with the cells. When we did the first clinical trial for these patients we actually created the scaffold specifically for each patient. We brought patients in, six to eight weeks prior to their scheduled surgery, did X-rays, and we then composed a scaffold specifically for that patient's size pelvic cavity. For the second phase of the trials we just had different sizes, small, medium, large and extra-large. (Laughter) It's true. And I'm sure everyone here wanted an extra-large. Right? (Laughter) So, bladders are definitely a little bit more complex than the other structures. But there are other hollow organs that have added complexity to it. This is actually a heart valve, which we engineered. And the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy. We take the scaffold, we seed it with cells, and you can now see here, the valve leaflets opening and closing. We exercise these prior to implantation. Same strategy. And then the most complex are the solid organs. For solid organs, they're more complex because you're using a lot more cells per centimeter. This is actually a simple solid organ like the ear. It's now being seeded with cartilage. That's the oven-like device; once it's coated it gets placed there. And then a few weeks later we can take out the cartilage scaffold. This is actually digits that we're engineering. These are being layered, one layer at a time, first the bone, we fill in the gaps with cartilage. We then start adding the muscle on top. And you start layering these solid structures. Again, fairly more complex organs, but by far, the most complex solid organs are actually the vascularized, highly vascularized, a lot of blood vessel supply, organs such as the heart, the liver, the kidneys. This is actually an example — several strategies to engineer solid organs. This is actually one of the strategies. We use a printer. And instead of using ink, we use — you just saw an inkjet cartridge — we just use cells. This is actually your typical desktop printer. It's actually printing this two chamber heart, one layer at a time. You see the heart coming out there. It takes about 40 minutes to print, and about four to six hours later you see the muscle cells contract. (Applause) This technology was developed by Tao Ju, who worked at our institute. And this is actually still, of course, experimental, not for use in patients. Another strategy that we have followed is actually to use decellularized organs. We actually take donor organs, organs that are discarded, and we then can use very mild detergents to take all the cell elements out of these organs. So, for example on the left panel, top panel, you see a liver. We actually take the donor liver, we use very mild detergents, and we, by using these mild detergents, we take all the cells out of the liver. Two weeks later, we basically can lift this organ up, it feels like a liver, we can hold it like a liver, it looks like a liver, but it has no cells. All we are left with is the skeleton, if you will, of the liver, all made up of collagen, a material that's in our bodies, that will not reject. We can use it from one patient to the next. We then take this vascular structure and we can prove that we retain the blood vessel supply. You can see, actually that's a fluoroscopy. We're actually injecting contrast into the organ. Now you can see it start. We're injecting the contrast into the organ into this decellularized liver. And you can see the vascular tree that remains intact. We then take the cells, the vascular cells, blood vessel cells, we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient's own cells. We perfuse the outside of the liver with the patient's own liver cells. And we can then create functional livers. And that's actually what you're seeing. This is still experimental. But we are able to actually reproduce the functionality of the liver structure, experimentally. For the kidney, as I talked to you about the first painting that you saw, the first slide I showed you, 90 percent of the patients on the transplant wait list are waiting for a kidney, 90 percent. So, another strategy we're following is actually to create wafers that we stack together, like an accordion, if you will. So, we stack these wafers together, using the kidney cells. And then you can see these miniature kidneys that we've engineered. They are actually making urine. Again, small structures, our challenge is how to make them larger, and that is something we're working on right now at the institute. One of the things that I wanted to summarize for you then is what is a strategy that we're going for in regenerative medicine. If at all possible, we really would like to use smart biomaterials that we can just take off the shelf and regenerate your organs. We are limited with distances right now, but our goal is actually to increase those distances over time. If we cannot use smart biomaterials, then we'd rather use your very own cells. Why? Because they will not reject. We can take cells from you, create the structure, put it right back into you, they will not reject. And if possible, we'd rather use the cells from your very specific organ. If you present with a diseased wind pipe we'd like to take cells from your windpipe. If you present with a diseased pancreas we'd like to take cells from that organ. Why? Because we'd rather take those cells which already know that those are the cell types you want. A windpipe cell already knows it's a windpipe cell. We don't need to teach it to become another cell type. So, we prefer organ-specific cells. And today we can obtain cells from most every organ in your body, except for several which we still need stem cells for, like heart, liver, nerve and pancreas. And for those we still need stem cells. If we cannot use stem cells from your body then we'd like to use donor stem cells. And we prefer cells that will not reject and will not form tumors. And we're working a lot with the stem cells that we published on two years ago, stem cells from the amniotic fluid, and the placenta, which have those properties. So, at this point, I do want to tell you that some of the major challenges we have. You know, I just showed you this presentation, everything looks so good, everything works. Actually no, these technologies really are not that easy. Some of the work you saw today was performed by over 700 researchers at our institute across a 20-year time span. So, these are very tough technologies. Once you get the formula right you can replicate it. But it takes a lot to get there. So, I always like to show this cartoon. This is how to stop a runaway stage. And there you see the stagecoach driver, and he goes, on the top panel, He goes A, B, C, D, E, F. He finally stops the runaway stage. And those are usually the basic scientists, The bottom is usually the surgeons. (Laughter) I'm a surgeon so that's not that funny. (Laughter) But actually method A is the correct approach. And what I mean by that is that anytime we've launched one of these technologies to the clinic, we've made absolutely sure that we do everything we can in the laboratory before we ever launch these technologies to patients. And when we launch these technologies to patients we want to make sure that we ask ourselves a very tough question. Are you ready to place this in your own loved one, your own child, your own family member, and then we proceed. Because our main goal, of course, is first, to do no harm. I'm going to show you now, a very short clip, It's a five second clip of a patient who received one of the engineered organs. We started implanting some of these structures over 14 years ago. So, we have patients now walking around with organs, engineered organs, for over 10 years, as well. I'm going to show a clip of one young lady. She had a spina bifida defect, a spinal cord abnormality. She did not have a normal bladder. This is a segment from CNN. We are just taking five seconds. This is a segment that Sanjay Gupta actually took care of. Video: Kaitlyn M: I'm happy. I was always afraid that I was going to have like, an accident or something. And now I can just go and go out with my friends, go do whatever I want. Anthony Atala: See, at the end of the day, the promise of regenerative medicine is a single promise. And that is really very simple, to make our patients better. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Your health depends on where you live

{0: "Bill Davenhall wants to improve physicians' diagnostic techniques by collecting each patient's geographic and environmental data, and merging it with their medical records."}

TEDMED 2009

Can geographic information make you healthy? In 2001 I got hit by a train. My train was a heart attack. I found myself in a hospital in an intensive-care ward, recuperating from emergency surgery. And I suddenly realized something: that I was completely in the dark. I started asking my questions, "Well, why me?" "Why now?" "Why here?" "Could my doctor have warned me?" So, what I want to do here in the few minutes I have with you is really talk about what is the formula for life and good health. Genetics, lifestyle and environment. That's going to sort of contain our risks, and if we manage those risks we're going to live a good life and a good healthy life. Well, I understand the genetics and lifestyle part. And you know why I understand that? Because my physicians constantly ask me questions about this. Have you ever had to fill out those long, legal-size forms in your doctor's office? I mean, if you're lucky enough you get to do it more than once, right? (Laughter) Do it over and over again. And they ask you questions about your lifestyle and your family history, your medication history, your surgical history, your allergy history ... did I forget any history? But this part of the equation I didn't really get, and I don't think my physicians really get this part of the equation. What does that mean, my environment? Well, it can mean a lot of things. This is my life. These are my life places. We all have these. While I'm talking I'd like you to also be thinking about: How many places have you lived? Just think about that, you know, wander through your life thinking about this. And you realize that you spend it in a variety of different places. You spend it at rest and you spend it at work. And if you're like me, you're in an airplane a good portion of your time traveling some place. So, it's not really simple when somebody asks you, "Where do you live, where do you work, and where do you spend all your time? And where do you expose yourselves to risks that maybe perhaps you don't even see?" Well, when I have done this on myself, I always come to the conclusion that I spend about 75 percent of my time relatively in a small number of places. And I don't wander far from that place for a majority of my time, even though I'm an extensive global trekker. Now, I'm going to take you on a little journey here. I started off in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I don't know if anybody might hail from northeastern Pennsylvania, but this is where I spent my first 19 years with my little young lungs. You know, breathing high concentrations here of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and methane gas, in unequal quantities — 19 years of this. And if you've been in that part of the country, this is what those piles of burning, smoldering coal waste look like. So then I decided to leave that part of the world, and I was going to go to the mid-west. OK, so I ended up in Louisville, Kentucky. Well, I decided to be neighbors to a place called Rubbertown. They manufacture plastics. They use large quantities chloroprene and benzene. Okay, I spent 25 years, in my middle-age lungs now, breathing various concentrations of that. And on a clear day it always looked like this, so you never saw it. It was insidious and it was really happening. Then I decided I had to get really smart, I would take this job in the West Coast. And I moved to Redlands California. Very nice, and there my older, senior lungs, as I like to call them, I filled with particulate matter, carbon dioxide and very high doses of ozone. Okay? Almost like the highest in the nation. Alright, this is what it looks like on a good day. If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. So, what's wrong with this picture? Well, the picture is, there is a huge gap here. The one thing that never happens in my doctor's office: They never ask me about my place history. No doctor, can I remember, ever asking me, "Where have you lived?" They haven't asked me what kind of the quality of the drinking water that I put in my mouth or the food that I ingest into my stomach. They really don't do that. It's missing. Look at the kind of data that's available. This data's from all over the world — countries spend billions of dollars investing in this kind of research. Now, I've circled the places where I've been. Well, by design, if I wanted to have a heart attack I'd been in the right places. Right? So, how many people are in the white? How many people in the room have spent the majority of their life in the white space? Anybody? Boy you're lucky. How many have spent it in the red places? Oh, not so lucky. There are thousands of these kinds of maps that are displayed in atlases all over the world. They give us some sense of what's going to be our train wreck. But none of that's in my medical record. And it's not in yours either. So, here's my friend Paul. He's a colleague. He allowed his cell phone to be tracked every two hours, 24/7, 365 days out of the year for the last two years, everywhere he went. And you can see he's been to a few places around the United States. And this is where he has spent most of his time. If you really studied that you might have some clues as to what Paul likes to do. Anybody got any clues? Ski. Right. We can zoom in here, and we suddenly see that now we see where Paul has really spent a majority of his time. And all of those black dots are all of the toxic release inventories that are monitored by the EPA. Did you know that data existed? For every community in the United States, you could have your own personalized map of that. So, our cell phones can now build a place history. This is how Paul did it. He did it with his iPhone. This might be what we end up with. This is what the physician would have in front of him and her when we enter that exam room instead of just the pink slip that said I paid at the counter. Right? This could be my little assessment. And he looks at that and he says, "Whoa Bill, I suggest that maybe you not decide, just because you're out here in beautiful California, and it's warm every day, that you get out and run at six o'clock at night. I'd suggest that that's a bad idea Bill, because of this report." What I'd like to leave you for are two prescriptions. Okay, number one is, we must teach physicians about the value of geographical information. It's called geomedicine. There are about a half a dozen programs in the world right now that are focused on this. And they're in the early stages of development. These programs need to be supported, and we need to teach our future doctors of the world the importance of some of the information I've shared here with you today. The second thing we need to do is while we're spending billions and billions of dollars all over the world building an electronic health record, we make sure we put a place history inside that medical record. It not only will be important for the physician; it will be important for the researchers that now will have huge samples to draw upon. But it will also be useful for us. I could have made the decision, if I had this information, not to move to the ozone capital of the United States, couldn't I? I could make that decision. Or I could negotiate with my employer to make that decision in the best interest of myself and my company. With that, I would like to just say that Jack Lord said this almost 10 years ago. Just look at that for a minute. That was what the conclusion of the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare was about, was saying that we can explain the geographic variations that occur in disease, in illness, in wellness, and how our healthcare system actually operates. That was what he was talking about on that quote. And I would say he got it right almost a decade ago. So, I'd very much like to see us begin to really seize this as an opportunity to get this into our medical records. So with that, I'll leave you that in my particular view of view of health: Geography always matters. And I believe that geographic information can make both you and me very healthy. Thank you. (Applause)

Building a theater that remakes itself

{0: 'Joshua Prince-Ramus is best known as architect of the Seattle Central Library, already being hailed as a masterpiece of contemporary culture. Prince-Ramus was the founding partner of OMA New York—the American affiliate of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the Netherlands—and served as its Principal until he renamed the firm REX in 2006.'}

TEDxSMU

I'm going to speak to you today about architectural agency. What I mean by that is that it's time for architecture to do things again, not just represent things. This is a construction helmet that I received two years ago at the groundbreaking of the largest project I, and my firm, have ever been involved in. I was thrilled to get it. I was thrilled to be the only person standing on the stage with a shiny silver helmet. I thought it represented the importance of the architect. I stayed thrilled until I got home, threw the helmet onto my bed, fell down onto my bed and realized inside there was an inscription. (Laughter) Now, I think that this is a great metaphor for the state of architecture and architects today. We are for decorative purposes only. (Laughter) Now, who do we have to blame? We can only blame ourselves. Over the last 50 years the design and construction industry has gotten much more complex and has gotten much more litigious. And we architects are cowards. So, as we have faced liability, we have stepped back and back, and unfortunately, where there is liability, guess what there is: power. So, eventually we have found ourselves in a totally marginalized position, way over here. Now, what did we do? We're cowards, but we're smart cowards. And so we redefined this marginalized position as the place of architecture. And we announced, "Hey, architecture, it's over here, in this autonomous language we're going to seed control of processes." And we were going to do something that was horrible for the profession. We actually created an artificial schism between creation and execution, as if you could actually create without knowing how to execute and as if you could actually execute without knowing how to create. Now, something else happened. And that's when we began to sell the world that architecture was created by individuals creating genius sketches. And that the incredible amount of effort to deliver those sketches for years and years and years is not only something to be derided, but we would merely write it off as merely execution. Now I'd argue that that is as absurd as stating that 30 minutes of copulation is the creative act, and nine months of gestation, and, God forbid, 24 hours of child labor is merely execution. So, what do we architects need to do? We need to stitch back creation and execution. And we need to start authoring processes again instead of authoring objects. Now, if we do this, I believe we can go back 50 years and start reinjecting agency, social engineering, back into architecture. Now, there are all kinds of things that we architects need to learn how to do, like managing contracts, learning how to write contracts, understanding procurement processes, understanding the time value of money and cost estimation. But I'm going to reduce this to the beginning of the process, into three very pedantic statements. The first is: Take core positions with your client. I know it's shocking, right, that architecture would actually say that. The second position is: Actually take positions. Take joint positions with your client. This is the moment in which you as the architect and your client can begin to inject vision and agency. But it has to be done together. And then only after this is done are you allowed to do this, begin to put forward architectural manifestations that manifest those positions. And both owner and architect alike are empowered to critique those manifestations based on the positions that you've taken. Now, I believe that one really amazing thing will happen if you do this. I'd like to call it the lost art of productively losing control. You do not know what the end result is. But I promise you, with enough brain power and enough passion and enough commitment, you will arrive at conclusions that will transcend convention, and will simply be something that you could not have initially or individually conceived of. Alright, now I'm going to reduce all of this to a series of simple dumb sketches. This is the modus operandi that we have today. We roll 120-foot Spartan, i.e. our vision, up to our clients' gates of Troy. And we don't understand why they won't let us in. Right? Well, how about instead of doing that, we roll up to the gates something they want. Now this is a little bit of a dangerous metaphor, because of course we all know that inside of the Trojan Horse were a bunch of people with spears. So, we can change the metaphor. Let's call the Trojan Horse the vessel by which you get through the gate, get through the constraints of a project. At which point, you and your client have the ability to start considering what you're going to put inside that vessel, the agency, the vision. And if you do that, you do that responsibly, I believe that instead of delivering Spartans, you can deliver maidens. And if I could summarize that all up into one single sketch it would be this. If we are so good at our craft shouldn't we be able to conceive of an architectural manifestation that slides seamlessly through the project's and the client's constraints? Now, with that in mind, I'm going to show a project that's very dear to many people in this room— well, maybe not dear, but certainly close to many people in this room. And that's a project that is just about to open next week, the new home for the Dallas Theater Center, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre. Now, I'm going to present it on the same terms: issue, position and architectural manifestation. Now, the first issue that we faced was that the Dallas Theater Center had a notoriety that was beyond what you would expect of some place outside of the triumvirate of New York, Chicago and Seattle. And this had to do with the ambitions of the leadership. But it also had to do with something rather unusual, and that was this horrible little building that they'd been performing in. Why was this horrible little building so important to their renown and their innovation? Because they could do whatever they wanted to to this building. When you're on Broadway, you cannot tear the proscenium down. This building, when an artistic director wanted to do a "Cherry Orchard" and wanted people and wanted people to come out of a well on the stage, they brought a backhoe in, and they simply dug the hole. Well, that's exciting. And you can start to get the best artistic directors, scenic designers and actors from around the country to come to perform here because you can do things you can't do elsewhere. So, the first position we took was, "Hey, we as architects had better not show up and do a pristine building that doesn't engender the same freedoms that this old dilapidated shed provided the company." The second issue is a nuance of the first. And that's that the company and the building was multiform. That meant that they were able to perform, as long as they had labor they were able to go between proscenium, thrust, flat floor, arena, traverse, you name it. All they needed was labor. Well, something happened. In fact something happened to all institutions around the world. It started to become hard to raise operational costs, operational budgets. So, they stopped having inexpensive labor. And eventually they had to freeze their organization into something called a bastardized thruscenium. So, the second position we took is that the freedoms that we provided, the ability to move between stage configurations, had better be able to be done without relying on operational costs. Alright? Affordably. The architectural manifestation was frankly just dumb. It was to take all the things that are known as front of house and back of house and redefine them as above house and below house. At first blush you think, "Hey it's crazy, what could you possibly gain?" We created what we like to call superfly. (Laughter) Now, superfly, the concept is you take all the freedoms you normally associate with the flytower, and you smear them across flytower and auditorium. Suddenly the artistic director can move between different stage and audience configurations. And because that flytower has the ability to pick up all the pristine elements, suddenly the rest of the environment can be provisional. And you can drill, cut, nail, screw paint and replace, with a minimum of cost. But there was a third advantage that we got by doing this move that was unexpected. And that was that it freed up the perimeter of the auditorium in a most unusual way. And that provided the artistic director suddenly the ability to define suspension of disbelief. So, the building affords artistic directors the freedom to conceive of almost any kind of activity underneath this floating object. But also to challenge the notion of suspension of disbelief such that in the last act of Macbeth, if he or she wants you to associate the parable that you're seeing with Dallas, with your real life, he or she can do so. Now, in order to do this we and the clients had to do something fairly remarkable. In fact it really was the clients who had to do it. They had to make a decision, based on the positions we took to redefine the budget being from two thirds capital-A architecture and one-third infrastructure, to actually the inverse, two-thirds infrastructure and one-third capital-A architecture. That's a lot for a client to commit to before you actually see the fruition of the concept. But based on the positions, they took the educated leap of faith to do so. And effectively we created what we like to call a theater machine. Now, that theater machine has ability to move between a whole series of configurations at the push of a button and a few stagehands in a short amount of time. But it also has the potential to not only provide multiform but multi-processional sequences. Meaning: The artistic director doesn't necessarily need to go through our lobby. One of the things that we learned when we visited various theaters is they hate us architects, because they say the first thing they have to do, the first five minutes of any show, is they have to get our architecture out of the mind of their patron. Well now there are potentials of this building to allow the artistic director to actually move into the building without using our architecture. So, in fact, there is the building, there is what we call the draw. You're going down into our lobby, go through the lobby with our own little dangly bits, whether you like them or not, up through the stair that leads you into the auditorium. But there is also the potential to allow people to move directly from the outside, in this case suggesting kind of Wagnerian entrance, into the interior of the auditorium. And here is the fruition of that in actuality. These are the two large pivoting doors that allow people to move directly from the outside, in or from the inside, out, performers or audience alike. Now, imagine what that could be. I have to say honestly this is not something yet the building can do because it takes too long. But imagine the freedoms if you could take this further, that in fact you could consider a Wagnerian entry, a first act in thrust, an intermission in Greek, a second act in arena, and you leave through our lobby with dangly bits. Now that, I would say, is architecture performing. It is taking the hand of the architect to actually remove the hand of the architect in favor of the hand of the artistic director. I'll go through the three basic configurations. This is the flat floor configuration. You notice that there is no proscenium, the balconies have been raised up, there are no seats, the floor in the auditorium is flat. The first configuration is easy to understand. The balconies come down, you see that the orchestra begins to have a rake that's frontal towards the end stage, and the seats come in. The third configuration is a little harder to understand. Here you see that the balconies actually have to move out of the way in order to bring a thrust into the space. And some of the seats need to actually change their direction, and change their rake, to allow that to happen. I'll do it again so you can see it. There you see it's the side balconies for the proscenium. And there it is in the thrust configuration. In order to do that, again, we needed a client who was willing to take educational risks. And they told us one important thing: "You shall not beta-test." Meaning, nothing that we do can we be the first ones to do it. But they were willing for us to apply technologies from other areas that already had failsafe mechanisms to this building. And the solution in terms of the balconies was to use something that we all know as a scoreboard lift. Now, if you were to take a scoreboard and drop it on dirt and whiskey, that would be bad. If you were not able to take the scoreboard out of the arena and be able to do the Ice Capades the next night, that would also be bad. And so this technology already had all the failsafe mechanisms and allowed the theater and our client to actually do this with confidence that they would be able to change over their configurations at will. The second technology that we applied was actually using things that you know from the stage side of an opera house. In this case what we're doing is we're taking the orchestra floor, lifting it up, spinning it, changing the rake, taking it back to flat floor, changing the rake again. In essence, you can begin to define rakes and viewing angles of people in the orchestra seating, at will. Here you see the chairs being spun around to go from proscenium or end stage to thrust configuration. The proscenium, also. As far as we know this is the first building in the world in which the proscenium can entirely fly out of the space. Here you see the various acoustic baffles as well as the flying mechanisms and catwalks over the auditorium. And ultimately, up in the flytower, the scene sets that allow the transformations to occur. As I said, all that was in service of creating a flexible yet affordable configuration. But we got this other benefit, and that was the ability of the perimeter to suddenly engage Dallas on the outside. Here you see the building in its current state with blinds closed. This is a trompe l'oeil. Actually this is not a curtain. These are vinyl blinds that are integrated into the windows themselves, again with failsafe mechanisms that can be lifted such that you can completely demystify, if you chose, the operations of the theater going on behind, rehearsals and so forth. But you also have the ability to allow the audience to see Dallas, to perform with Dallas as the backdrop of your performance. Now, if I'll take you through — this is an early concept sketch — take you through kind of a mixture of all these things together. Effectively you would have something like this. You would be allowed to bring objects or performers into the performing chamber: "Aida," their elephants, you can bring the elephants in. You would be able to expose the auditorium to Dallas or vice versa, Dallas to the auditorium. You'd be able to open portions in order to change the procession, allow people to come in and out for an intermission, or to enter for the beginning or the end of a performance. As I said, all the balconies can move, but they can also be disappeared completely. The proscenium can fly. You can bring large objects into the chamber itself. But most convincingly when we had to confront the idea of changing costs from architecture to infrastructure, is something that is represented by this. And again, this is not all the flexibilities of the building that is actually built, but at least suggests the ideas. This building has the ability, in short order, to go back to a flat floor organization such that they can rent it out. Now, if there is anyone here from American Airlines, please consider doing your Christmas party here. (Laughter) That allows the company to raise operational budgets without having to compete with other venues with much larger auditoriums. That's an enormous benefit. So, the theater company has the ability to do totally hermetic, light-controlled, sound-controlled, great acoustics, great intimacy Shakespeare, but can also do Beckett with the skyline of Dallas sitting behind it. Here it is in a flat floor configuration. The theater has been going through its kind of paces. Here it is in an end stage configuration. It's actually beautiful. There was a rock band. We stood outside trying to see if the acoustics worked, and you could see the guys doing this but you couldn't hear them. It was very unusual. Here it is in a thrust configuration. And last but not least, you see this already has the ability to create events in order to generate operational budgets to overcome the building in fact performing to allow the company to overcome their biggest problem. I'm going to show you a brief time lapse. As I said, this can be done with only two people, and with a minimum amount of time. This is the first time that actually the changeover was done and so there is literally thousands of people because everyone was excited and wanted to be a part of it. So, in a way try to disregard all the thousands of ants running around. And think of it being done with just a few people. Again, just a couple people are required. (Laughter) I promise. Et voila. (Applause) So, just in conclusion, a few shots. This is the AT&T Performing Arts Center's Dee and Charles Wyly Theater. There it is at night. And last but not least the entire AT&T Performing Arts Center. You can see the Winspear Opera House on the right and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater on the left. And to remind you that here is an example in which architecture actually did something. But we got to that conclusion without understanding where we were going, what we knew were a series of issues that the company and the client was confronted with. And we took positions with them, and it was through those positions that we began to take architectural manifestations and we arrived at a conclusion that none of us, really none of us could ever have conceived of initially or individually. Thank you. (Applause)

Embrace your inner girl

{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.'}

TEDIndia 2009

Namaste. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here in India. And I've been thinking a lot about what I have learned over these last particularly 11 years with V-Day and "The Vagina Monologues," traveling the world, essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women. What I want to talk about today is this particular cell, or grouping of cells, that is in each and every one of us. And I want to call it the girl cell. And it's in men as well as in women. I want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race. And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell, the oppression of these cells, the reinterpretation of these cells, the undermining of these cells, getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing, eradicating, destroying, reducing these cells, basically began the process of killing off the girl cell, which was, by the way, patriarchy. I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness. And it is essential to balance, to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us. And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion, and it's empathy, and it's passion itself, and it's vulnerability, and it's openness, and it's intensity, and it's association, and it's relationship, and it is intuitive. And then let's think how compassion informs wisdom, and that vulnerability is our greatest strength, and that emotions have inherent logic, which lead to radical, appropriate, saving action. And then let's remember that we've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be, that compassion clouds your thinking, that it gets in the way, that vulnerability is weakness, that emotions are not to be trusted, and you're not supposed to take things personally, which is one of my favorites. I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy? To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong means not to be a girl. To be a leader means not to be a girl. I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we've had to train everyone not to be that. (Laughter) And I'd also like to say that the irony of course, is that denying girl, suppressing girl, suppressing emotion, refusing feeling has lead thus here. Where we have now come to live in a world where the most extreme forms of violence, the most horrific poverty, genocide, mass rapes, the destruction of the Earth, is completely out of control. And because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship, we do not feel what is going on. So, we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening. I want to talk a little bit about the Democratic Republic of Congo. For me, it was the turning point of my life. I have spent a lot of time there in the last three years. I feel up to that point I had seen a lot in the world, a lot of violence. I essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years. But the Democratic Republic of Congo really was the turning point in my soul. I went and I spent time in a place called Bukavu in a hospital called the Panzi Hospital, with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person I've ever met. His name is Dr. Denis Mukwege. In the Congo, for those of you who don't know, there has been a war raging for the last 12 years, a war that has killed nearly six million people. It is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there. When I spent my first weeks at Panzi hospital I sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories. Their stories were so horrific, and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence, that to be perfectly honest with you, I was shattered. And I will tell you that what happened is through that shattering, listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated, who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes, literally, inside them where their pee and poop came out of them. Listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled, and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically, all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the West can have it and profit from them. My mind was so shattered. But what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way I have never been emboldened. That shattering, that opening of my girl cell, that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous, and braver, and actually more clever than I had been in the past in my life. I want to say that I think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually — that feelings get in the way of empire-building. Feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the Earth, and excavating the Earth, and destroying things. I remember, for example, when my father, who was very, very violent, used to beat me. And he would actually say, while he was beating me, "Don't you cry. Don't you dare cry." Because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him. And even in the moment he didn't want to be reminded of what he was doing. I know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell. And I want to say we've annihilated it in men as well as in women. And I think in some ways we've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell. (Applause) I see how boys have been brought up, and I see this across the planet: to be tough, to be hardened, to distance themselves from their tenderness, to not cry. I actually realized once in Kosovo, when I watched a man break down, that bullets are actually hardened tears, that when we don't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability, and have their compassion, and have their hearts, that they become hardened and hurtful and violent. And I think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure, to pretend they know things when they don't know things, or why would we be where we are? To pretend they're not a mess when they are a mess. And I will tell you a very funny story. On my way here on the airplane, I was walking up and down the aisle of the plane. And all these men, literally at least 10 men, were in their little seats watching chick flicks. And they were all alone, and I thought, "This is the secret life of men." (Laughter) I've traveled, as I said, to many, many countries, and I've seen, if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world. And we heard from Sunitha yesterday, and Kavita about what we do to girls. But I just want to say that I've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns, who are literally being treated like ashtrays. I've seen girls be treated like garbage cans. I've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles. I've seen girls starving themselves to death in America in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves. I've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate, or we make them feel bad about being too smart. We silence them. We make them feel guilty for being smart. We get them to behave, to tone it down, not to be too intense. We sell them, we kill them as embryos, we enslave them, we rape them. We are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities. The selling of girls is rampant across the planet. And in many places they are worth less than goats and cows. But I also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24, they are they key, really, in the developing world, as well as in the whole world, to the future of humanity. And if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be, including lack of access to healthcare, education, healthy foods, labor force participation. The burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings, which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers. The state of girls, the condition of girls, will, in my belief — and that's the girl inside us and the girl in the world — determine whether the species survives. And what I want to suggest is that, having talked to girls, because I just finished a new book called "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World," I've been talking to girls for five years, and one of the things that I've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that's been enforced on girl is the verb "to please." Girls are trained to please. I want to change the verb. I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be "educate," or "activate," or "engage," or "confront," or "defy," or "create." If we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them. And I have to now share a few stories of girls I've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl, who have taken on their girl in spite of all the circumstances around them. I know a 14-year-old girl in the Netherlands, for example, who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself. There is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face. There is a girl, Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks. There is a girl who I met 14 years ago in Afghanistan who I have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed. Her mother was a revolutionary. And this girl, when she was 17 years old, wore a burqa in Afghanistan, and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women, underneath her burqa, with a video. And that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9/11 to show what was going on in Afghanistan. I want to talk about Rachel Corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an Israeli tank to say, "End the occupation." And she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank. And I want to talk about a girl that I just met recently in Bukavu, who was impregnated by her rapist. And she was holding her baby. And I asked her if she loved her baby. And she looked into her baby's eyes and she said, "Of course I love my baby. How could I not love my baby? It's my baby and it's full of love." The capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels, to me, is mind-blowing. There is a girl named Dorcas, and I just met her in Kenya. Dorcas is 15 years old, and she was trained in self-defense. A few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men. They kidnapped her, they put her in a car. And through her self-defense, she grabbed their Adam's apples, she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car. In Kenya, in August, I went to visit one of the V-Day safe houses for girls, a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named Agnes Pareyio. Agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl, she was female genitally mutilated. And she made a decision as many women do across this planet, that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls. So, for years Agnes walked through the Rift valley. She taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like, and what a mutilated vagina looked like. And in that time she saved many girls. And when we met her we asked her what we could do for her, and she said, "Well, if you got me a Jeep I could get around a lot faster." So, we got her a Jeep. And then she saved 4,500 girls. And then we asked her, "Okay, what else do you need?" And she said, "Well, now, I need a house." So, seven years ago Agnes built the first V-Day safe house in Narok, Kenya, in the Masai land. And it was a house where girls could run away, they could save their clitoris, they wouldn't be cut, they could go to school. And in the years that Agnes has had the house, she has changed the situation there. She has literally become deputy mayor. She's changed the rules. The whole community has bought in to what she's doing. When we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls, who have run away, with their families. And there was a young girl named Jaclyn. Jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her Masai family and there's a drought in Kenya. So cows are dying, and cows are the most valued possession. And Jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows. And she knew that meant she would be cut. She knew that meant she wouldn't go to school. She knew that meant she wouldn't have a future. She knew she would have to marry that old man, and she was 14. So, one afternoon, she'd heard about the safe house, Jaclyn left her father's house and she walked for two days, two days through Masai land. She slept with the hyenas. She hid at night. She imagined her father killing her on one hand, and Mama Agnes greeting her, with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house. And when she got to the house she was greeted. Agnes took her in, and Agnes loved her, and Agnes supported her for the year. She went to school and she found her voice, and she found her identity, and she found her heart. Then, her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation, after a year. I had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled. In that hut, we walked in, and her father and his four wives were sitting there, and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled, and her primary mother, who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders. When her father saw her and saw who she had become, in her full girl self, he threw his arms around her and broke down crying. He said, "You are beautiful. You have grown into a gorgeous woman. We will not cut you. And I give you my word, here and now, that we will not cut your sisters either." And what she said to him was, "You were willing to sell me for four cows, and a calf and some blankets. But I promise you, now that I will be educated I will always take care of you, and I will come back and I will build you a house. And I will be in your corner for the rest of your life." For me, that is the power of girls. And that is the power of transformation. I want to close today with a new piece from my book. And I want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here. And I want to do it for Sunitha. And I want to do it for the girls that Sunitha talked about yesterday, the girls who survive, the girls who can become somebody else. But I really want to do it for each and every person here, to value the girl in us, to value the part that cries, to value the part that's emotional, to value the part that's vulnerable, to understand that's where the future lies. This is called "I'm An Emotional Creature." And it happened because I met a girl in Watts, L.A. I was asking girls if they like being a girl, and all the girls were like, "No, I hate it. I can't stand it. It's all bad. My brothers get everything." And this girl just sat up and went, "I love being a girl. I'm an emotional creature!" (Laughter) This is for her: I love being a girl. I can feel what you're feeling as you're feeling inside the feeling before. I am an emotional creature. Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas. They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears. Oh, I know when your girlfriend's really pissed off, even though she appears to give you what you want. I know when a storm is coming. I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air. I can tell you he won't call back. It's a vibe I share. I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. Everything is intense to me, the way I walk in the street, the way my momma wakes me up, the way it's unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news. I am an emotional creature. I am connected to everything and everyone. I was born like that. Don't you say all negative that it's only only a teenage thing, or it's only because I'm a girl. These feelings make me better. They make me present. They make me ready. They make me strong. I am an emotional creature. There is a particular way of knowing. It's like the older women somehow forgot. I rejoice that it's still in my body. Oh, I know when the coconut's about to fall. I know we have pushed the Earth too far. I know my father isn't coming back, and that no one's prepared for the fire. I know that lipstick means more than show, and boys are super insecure, and so-called terrorists are made, not born. I know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability. (Laughter) And you know what? Sometimes it should. This is not extreme. It's a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open. Don't tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable. I am an emotional creature. It's how the earth got made, how the wind continues to pollinate. You don't tell the Atlantic Ocean to behave. I am an emotional creature. Why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing's been diluted. Nothing's leaked out. I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible. I am an emotional, I am an emotional, incondotional, devotional creature. And I love, hear me, I love, love, love being a girl. Can you say it with me? I love, I love, love, love being a girl! Thank you very much. (Applause)

A warm embrace that saves lives

{0: 'TED Fellow Jane Chen has spent years working on health issues in the developing world. '}

TEDIndia 2009

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

Weird, or just different?

{0: 'Through his new project, MuckWork, Derek Sivers wants to lessen the burdens (and boredom) of creative people.'}

TEDIndia 2009

So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says, "Excuse me, what is the name of this block?" And you say, "I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street. This is 26th, that's 27th." He says, "OK, but what is the name of that block?" You say, "Well, blocks don't have names. Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets." He leaves, a little confused and disappointed. So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say, "Excuse me, what is the name of this street?" They say, "Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16." And you say, "OK, but what is the name of this street?" And they say, "Well, streets don't have names. Blocks have names. Just look at Google Maps here. There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks. And you say then, "OK, then how do you know your home address?" He said, "Well, easy, this is District Eight. There's Block 17, house number one." You say, "OK, but walking around the neighborhood, I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order." He says, "Of course they do. They go in the order in which they were built. The first house ever built on a block is house number one. The second house ever built is house number two. Third is house number three. It's easy. It's obvious." So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true. So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy. So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you're healthy, not sick. (Applause) In most music, we think of the "one" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four. But in West African music, the "one" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence. So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one. And this map is also accurate. (Laughter) There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true. So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true. Domo arigato gozaimashita.

Solving social problems with a nudge

{0: 'Sendhil Mullainathan asks a compelling question: what are the irrational choices we make that perpetuate poverty, corruption, discrimination?'}

TEDIndia 2009

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in. And these are unfortunate moments, because you go to sleep that night dumber than when you woke up. So, that's really the goal of my talk, is to A, communicate that moment to you and B, have you leave this session a little dumber than when you entered. So, I hope I can really accomplish that. So, this incident that I'm going to describe really began with some diarrhea. Now, we've known for a long time the cause of diarrhea. That's why there's a glass of water up there. For us, it's a problem, the people in this room. For babies, it's deadly. They lack nutrients, and diarrhea dehydrates them. And so, as a result, there is a lot of death, a lot of death. In India in 1960, there was a 24 percent child mortality rate, lots of people didn't make it. This is incredibly unfortunate. One of the big reasons this happened was because of diarrhea. Now, there was a big effort to solve this problem, and there was actually a big solution. This solution has been called, by some, "potentially the most important medical advance this century." Now, the solution turned out to be simple. And what it was was oral rehydration salts. Many of you have probably used this. It's brilliant. It's a way to get sodium and glucose together so that when you add it to water the child is able to absorb it even during situations of diarrhea. Remarkable impact on mortality. Massive solution to the problem. Flash forward: 1960, 24 percent child mortality has dropped to 6.5 percent today. Still a big number, but a big drop. It looks like the technological problem is solved. But if you look, even today there are about 400,000 diarrhea-related deaths in India alone. What's going on here? Well the easy answer is, we just haven't gotten those salts to those people. That's actually not true. If you look in areas where these salts are completely available, the price is low or zero, these deaths still continue abated. Maybe there's a biological answer. Maybe these are the deaths that simple rehydration alone doesn't solve. That's not true either. Many of these deaths were completely preventable, and this what I want to think of as the disconcerting thing, what I want to call "the last mile" problem. See, we spent a lot of energy, in many domains — technological, scientific, hard work, creativity, human ingenuity — to crack important social problems with technology solutions. That's been the discoveries of the last 2,000 years, that's mankind moving forward. But in this case we cracked it, but a big part of the problem still remains. Nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well, the last mile's proving incredibly stubborn. Now, that's for oral rehydration therapy. Maybe this is something unique about diarrhea. Well, it turns out — and this is where things get really disconcerting — it's not unique to diarrhea. It's not even unique to poor people in India. Here's an example from a variety of contexts. I've put a bunch of examples up here. I'll start with insulin, diabetes medication in the U.S. OK, the American population. On Medicaid — if you're fairly poor you get Medicaid, or if you have health insurance — insulin is pretty straightforward. You get it, either in pill form or you get it as an injection; you have to take it every day to maintain your blood sugar levels. Massive technological advance: took an incredibly deadly disease, made it solvable. Adherence rates. How many people are taking their insulin every day? About on average, a typical person is taking it 75 percent of the time. As a result, 25,000 people a year go blind, hundreds of thousands lose limbs, every year, for something that's solvable. Here I have a bunch of other examples, all suffer from the last mile problem. It's not just medicine. Here's another example from technology: agriculture. We think there's a food problem, so we create new seeds. We think there's an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we'd already cracked. Intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. Some people are doing that, many are not. What's going on? This is the last mile. The last mile is, everywhere, problematic. Alright, what's the problem? The problem is this little three-pound machine that's behind your eyes and between your ears. This machine is really strange, and one of the consequences is that people are weird. They do lots of inconsistent things. (Applause) They do lots of inconsistent things. And the inconsistencies create, fundamentally, this last mile problem. See, when we were dealing with our biology, bacteria, the genes, the things inside here, the blood? That's complex, but it's manageable. When we're dealing with people like this? The mind is more complex. That's not as manageable, and that's what we're struggling with. Let me go back to diarrhea for a second. Here's a question that was asked in the National Sample Survey, which is a survey asked of many Indian women: "Your child has diarrhea. Should you increase, maintain or decrease the number of fluids?" Just so you don't embarrass yourselves, I'll give you the right answer: It's increase. Now, diarrhea's interesting because it's been around for thousands of years, ever since humankind really lived side by side enough to have really polluted water. One Roman strategy that was very interesting was that — and it really gave them a comparative advantage — they made sure their soldiers didn't drink even remotely muddied waters. Because if some of your troops get diarrhea they're not that effective on the battlefield. So, if you think of Roman comparative advantage part of it was the breast shields, the breastplates, but part of it was drinking the right water. So, here are these women. They've seen their parents have struggled with diarrhea, they've struggled with diarrhea, they've seen lots of deaths. How do they answer this question? In India, 35 to 50 percent say "Reduce." Think about what that means for a second. Thirty-five to 50 percent of women forget oral rehydration therapy, they are increasing — they are actually making their child more likely to die through their actions. How is that possible? Well, one possibility — I think that's how most people respond to this — is to say, "That's just stupid." I don't think that's stupid. I think there is something very profoundly right in what these women are doing. And that is, you don't put water into a leaky bucket. So, think of the mental model that goes behind reducing the intake. Just doesn't make sense. Now, the model is intuitively right. It just doesn't happen to be right about the world. But it makes a whole lot of sense at some deep level. And that, to me, is the fundamental challenge of the last mile. This first challenge is what I refer to as the persuasion challenge. Convincing people to do something — take oral rehydration therapy, intercrop, whatever it might be — is not an act of information: "Let's give them the data, and when they have data they'll do the right thing." It's more complex than that. And if you want to understand how it's more complex let me start with something kind of interesting. I'm going to give you a little math problem, and I want you to just yell out the answer as fast as possible. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Quick. So, somebody out there says, "Five." A lot of you said, "Ten." Let's think about 10 for a second. If the ball costs 10, the bat costs... this is easy, $1.10. Yeah. So, together they would cost $1.20. So, here you all are, ostensibly educated people. Most of you look smart. The combination of that produces something that is actually, you got this thing wrong. How is that possible? Let's go to something else. I know algebra can be complicated. So, let's dial this back. That's what? Fifth grade? Fourth grade? Let's go back to kindergarten. OK? There's a great show on American television that you have to watch. It's called "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" I think we've learned the answer to that here. Let's move to kindergarten. Let's see if we can beat five-year-olds. Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put objects on the screen. I just want you to name the color of the object. That's all it is. OK? I want you to do it fast, and say it out loud with me, and do it quickly. I'll make the first one easy for you. Ready? Black. Now the next ones I want you to do quickly and say it out loud. Ready? Go. Audience: Red. Green. Yellow. Blue. Red. (Laughter) Sendhil Mullainathan: That's pretty good. Almost out of kindergarten. What is all this telling us? You see, what's going on here, and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world, some models that you use to understand the world. These models, like the leaky bucket, work well in most situations. I suspect most of you — I hope that's true for the rest of you — actually do pretty well with addition and subtraction in the real world. I found a problem, a specific problem that actually found an error with that. Diarrhea, and many last mile problems, are like that. They are situations where the mental model doesn't match the reality. Same thing here: You had an intuitive response to this that was very quick. You read "blue" and you wanted to say "blue," even though you knew your task was red. Now, I do this stuff because it's fun. But it's more profound than fun. I'll give you a good example of how it actually effects persuasion. BMW is a pretty safe car. And they are trying to figure out, "Safety is good. I want to advertise safety. How am I going to advertise safety?" "I could give people numbers. We do well on crash tests." But the truth of the matter is, you look at that car, it doesn't look like a Volvo, and it doesn't look like a Hummer. So, what I want you to think about for a few minutes is: How would you convey safety of the BMW? Okay? So now, while you're thinking about that let's move to a second task. The second task is fuel efficiency. Okay? Here's another puzzle for all of you. One person walks into a car lot, and they're thinking about buying this Toyota Yaris. They are saying, "This is 35 miles per gallon. I'm going to do the environmentally right thing, I'm going to buy the Prius, 50 miles per gallon." Another person walks into the lot, and they're about to buy a Hummer, nine miles per gallon, fully loaded, luxury. And they say, "You know what? Do I need turbo? Do I need this heavyweight car?" I'm going to do something good for the environment. I'm going to take off some of that weight, and I'm going to buy a Hummer that's 11 miles per gallon." Which one of these people has done more for the environment? See, you have a mental model. Fifty versus 35, that's a big move. Eleven versus nine? Come on. Turns out, go home and do the math, the nine to 11 is a bigger change. That person has saved more gallons. Why? Because we don't care about miles per gallon, we care about gallons per mile. Think about how powerful that is if you're trying to encourage fuel efficiency. Miles per gallon is the way we present things. If we want to encourage change of behavior, gallons per mile would have far more effectiveness. Researchers have found these type of anomalies. Okay, back to BMW. What should they do? The problem BMW faces is this car looks safe. This car, which is my Mini, doesn't look that safe. Here was BMW's brilliant insight, which they embodied into an ad campaign. They showed a BMW driving down the street. There's a truck on the right. Boxes fall out of the truck. The car swerves to avoid it, and therefore doesn't get into an accident. BWM realizes safety, in people's minds, has two components. You can be safe because when you're hit, you survive, or you can be safe because you avoid accidents. Remarkably successful campaign, but notice the power of it. It harnesses something you already believe. Now, even if I persuaded you to do something, it's hard sometimes to actually get action as a result. You all probably intended to wake up, I don't know, 6:30, 7 a.m. This is a battle we all fight every day, along with trying to get to the gym. Now, this is an example of that battle, and makes us realize intentions don't always translate into action, and so one of the fundamental challenges is how we would actually do that. OK? So, let me now talk about the last mile problem. So far, I've been pretty negative. I've been trying to show you the oddities of human behavior. And I think maybe I'm being too negative. Maybe it's the diarrhea. Maybe the last mile problem really should be thought of as the last mile opportunity. Let's go back to diabetes. This is a typical insulin injection. Now, carrying this thing around is complicated. You gotta carry the bottle, you gotta carry the syringe. It's also painful. Now, you may think to yourself, "Well, if my eyes depended on it, you know, I would obviously use it every day." But the pain, the discomfort, you know, paying attention, remembering to put it in your purse when you go on a long trip: These are the day-to-day of life, and they do pose problems. Here is an innovation, a design innovation. This is a pen, it's called an insulin pen, preloaded. The needle is particularly sharp. You just gotta carry this thing around. It's much easier to use, much less painful. Anywhere between five and 10 percent increase in adherence, just as a result of this. That's what I'm talking about as a last mile opportunity. You see, we tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem. But the human innovation, the human problem still remains, and that's a great frontier that we have left. This isn't about the biology of people; this is now about the brains, the psychology of people, and innovation needs to continue all the way through the last mile. Here's another example of this. This is from a company called Positive Energy. This is about energy efficiency. We're spending a lot of time on fuel cells right now. What this company does is they send a letter to households that say, "Here's your energy use, here's your neighbor's energy use: You're doing well." Smiley face. "You're doing worse." Frown. And what they find is just this letter, nothing else, has a two to three percent reduction in electricity use. And you want to think about the social value of that in terms of carbon offsets, reduced electricity, 900 million dollars per year. Why? Because for free, this isn't a new technology, this is a letter — we're getting a Big Bang in behavior. So, how do we tackle the last mile? I think this tells us there is an opportunity. And I think to tackle it, we need to combine psychology, marketing, art, we've seen that. But you know what we need to combine it with? We need to combine this with the scientific method. See what's really puzzling and frustrating about the last mile, to me, is that the first 999 miles are all about science. No one would say, "Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it." We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? "Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there." The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way? Now, I think that we're on the verge of something big. We're on the verge of a whole new social science. It's a social science that recognizes — much like science recognizes the complexity of the body, biology recognizes the complexity of the body — we'll recognize the complexity of the human mind. The careful testing, retesting, design, are going to open up vistas of understanding, complexities, difficult things. And those vistas will both create new science, and fundamental change in the world as we see it, in the next hundred years. All right. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Sendhil, thank you so much. So, this whole area is so fascinating. I mean, it sometimes feels, listening to behavioral economists that they are kind of putting into place academically, what great marketers have sort of intuitively known for a long time. How much is your field talking to great marketers about their insights into human psychology? Because they've seen it on the ground. Sendhil Mullainathan: Yeah, we spend a lot of time talking to marketers, and I think 60 percent of it is exactly what you say, there are insights to be gleaned there. Forty percent of it is about what marketing is. Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, "This is a good ad campaign." So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That's just a caveat. That's different from actually having an effective ad campaign. And one of the new movements in marketing is: How do we actually measure effectiveness? Are we effective? CA: How you take your insights here and actually get them integrated into working business models on the ground, in Indian villages, for example? SM: So, the scientific method I alluded to is pretty important. We work closely with companies that have operational capacity, or nonprofits that have operational capacity. And then we say, "Well, you want to get this behavior change. Let's come up with a few ideas, test them, see which is working, go back, synthesize, and try to come up with a thing that works," and then we're able to scale with partners. It's kind of the model that has worked in other contexts. If you have biological problems we try and fix it, see if it works, and then work the scale. CA: Alright Sendhil, thanks so much for coming to TED. Thank you. (Applause)

The big idea my brother inspired

{0: 'When MIT-trained mechanical engineer Jamie Heywood discovered that his younger brother was diagnosed with the terminal illness ALS, he focused all his energy on founding revolutionary healthcare initiatives to help his brother and others like him. '}

TEDMED 2009

When my brother called me in December of 1998, he said, "The news does not look good." This is him on the screen. He'd just been diagnosed with ALS, which is a disease that the average lifespan is three years. It paralyzes you. It starts by killing the motor neurons in your spinal cord. And you go from being a healthy, robust 29-year-old male to someone that cannot breathe, cannot move, cannot speak. This has actually been, to me, a gift, because we began a journey to learn a new way of thinking about life. And even though Steven passed away three years ago we had an amazing journey as a family. We did not even — I think adversity is not even the right word. We looked at this and we said, "We're going to do something with this in an incredibly positive way." And I want to talk today about one of the things that we decided to do, which was to think about a new way of approaching healthcare. Because, as we all know here today, it doesn't work very well. I want to talk about it in the context of a story. This is the story of my brother. But it's just a story. And I want to go beyond the story, and go to something more. "Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?" is what we are here to do in medicine, is what everyone should do. And those questions all have variables to them. All of our statuses are different. All of our hopes and dreams, what we want to accomplish, is different, and our paths will be different, they are all stories. But it's a story until we convert it to data and so what we do, this concept we had, was to take Steven's status, "What is my status?" and go from this concept of walking, breathing, and then his hands, speak, and ultimately happiness and function. So, the first set of pathologies, they end up in the stick man on his icon, but the rest of them are really what's important here. Because Steven, despite the fact that he was paralyzed, as he was in that pool, he could not walk, he could not use his arms — that's why he had the little floaty things on them, did you see those? — he was happy. We were at the beach, he was raising his son, and he was productive. And we took this, and we converted it into data. But it's not a data point at that one moment in time. It is a data point of Steven in a context. Here he is in the pool. But here he is healthy, as a builder: taller, stronger, got all the women, amazing guy. Here he is walking down the aisle, but he can barely walk now, so it's impaired. And he could still hold his wife's hand, but he couldn't do buttons on his clothes, can't feed himself. And here he is, paralyzed completely, unable to breathe and move, over this time journey. These stories of his life, converted to data. He renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed, and unable to speak, and unable to breathe, and he won an award for a historic restoration. So, here's Steven alone, sharing this story in the world. And this is the insight, the thing that we are excited about, because we have gone away from the community that we are, the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other. We need to give to others to be successful. So, Steven is sharing this story, but he is not alone. There are so many other people sharing their stories. Not stories in words, but stories in data and words. And we convert that information into this structure, this understanding, this ability to convert those stories into something that is computable, to which we can begin to change the way medicine is done and delivered. We did this for ALS. We can do this for depression, Parkinson's disease, HIV. These are not simple, they are not internet scalable; they require thought and processes to find the meaningful information about the disease. So, this is what it looks like when you go to the website. And I'm going to show you what Patients Like Me, the company that myself, my youngest brother and a good friend from MIT started. Here are the actual patients, there are 45,000 of them now, sharing their stories as data. Here is an M.S. patient. His name is Mike, and he is uniformly impaired on cognition, vision, walking, sensation. Those are things that are different for each M.S. patient. Each of them can have a different characteristic. You can see fibromyalgia, HIV, ALS, depression. Look at this HIV patient down here, Zinny. It's two years of this disease. All of the symptoms are not there. But he is working to keep his CD4 count high and his viral level low so he can make his life better. But you can aggregate this and you can discover things about treatments. Look at this, 2,000 people almost, on Copaxone. These are patients currently on drugs, sharing data. I love some of these, physical exercise, prayer. Anyone want to run a comparative effectiveness study on prayer against something? Let's look at prayer. What I love about this, just sort of interesting design problems. These are why people pray. Here is the schedule of how frequently they — it's a dose. So, anyone want to see the 32 patients that pray for 60 minutes a day, and see if they're doing better, they probably are. Here they are. It's an open network, everybody is sharing. We can see it all. Or, I want to look at anxiety, because people are praying for anxiety. And here is data on 15,000 people's current anxiety, right now. How they treat it, the drugs, the components of it, their side effects, all of it in a rich environment, and you can drill down and see the individuals. This amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for — 1,500 people on this drug, I think. Yes. I want to talk to the 58 patients down here who are taking four milligrams a day. And I want to talk to the ones of those that have been doing it for more than two years. So, you can see the duration. All open, all available. I'm going to log in. And this is my brother's profile. And this is a new version of our platform we're launching right now. This is the second generation. It's going to be in Flash. And you can see here, as this animates over, Steven's actual data against the background of all other patients, against this information. The blue band is the 50th percentile. Steven is the 75th percentile, that he has non-genetic ALS. You scroll down in this profile and you can see all of his prescription drugs, but more than that, in the new version, I can look at this interactively. Wait, poor spinal capacity. Doesn't this remind you of a great stock program? Wouldn't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money? Detrol. In the side effects for his drug, integrated into that, the stem cell transplant that he had, the first in the world, shared openly for anyone who wants to see it. I love here — the cyberkinetics implant, which was, again, the only patient's data that was online and available. You can adjust the time scale. You can adjust the symptoms. You can look at the interaction between how I treat my ALS. So, you click down on the ALS tab there. I'm taking three drugs to manage it. Some of them are experimental. I can look at my constipation, how to manage it. I can see magnesium citrate, and the side effects from that drug all integrated in the time in which they're meaningful. But I want more. I don't want to just look at this cool device, I want to take this data and make something even better. I want my brother's center of the universe and his symptoms and his drugs, and all of the things that interact among those, the side effects, to be in this beautiful data galaxy that we can look at in any way we want to understand it, so that we can take this information and go beyond just this simple model of what a record is. I don't even know what a medical record is. I want to solve a problem. I want an application. So, can I take this data — rearrange yourself, put the symptoms in the left, the drugs across the top, tell me everything we know about Steven and everyone else, and what interacts. Years after he's had these drugs, I learned that everything he did to manage his excess saliva, including some positive side effects that came from other drugs, were making his constipation worse. And if anyone's ever had severe constipation, and you don't understand how much of an impact that has on your life — yes, that was a pun. You're trying to manage these, and this grid is available here, and we want to understand it. No one's ever had this kind of information. So, patients have this. We're for patients. This is all about patient health care, there was no doctors on our network. This is about the patients. So, how can we take this and bring them a tool that they can go back and they can engage the medical system? And we worked hard, and we thought about it and we said, "What's something we can use all the time, that we can use in the medical care system, that everyone will understand?" So, the patients print it out, because hospitals usually block us because they believe we are a social network. It's actually the most used feature on the website. Doctors actually love this sheet, and they're actually really engaged. So, we went from this story of Steven and his history to data, and then back to paper, where we went back and engaged the medical care system. And here's another paper. This is a journal, PNAS — I think it's the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America. You've seen multiple of these today, when everyone's bragging about the amazing things they've done. This is a report about a drug called lithium. Lithium, that is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder, that a group in Italy found slowed ALS down in 16 patients, and published it. Now, we'll skip the critiques of the paper. But the short story is: If you're a patient, you want to be on the blue line. You don't want to be on the red line, you want to be on the blue line. Because the blue line is a better line. The red line is way downhill, the blue line is a good line. So, you know we said — we looked at this, and what I love also is that people always accuse these Internet sites of promoting bad medicine and having people do things irresponsibly. So, this is what happened when PNAS published this. Ten percent of the people in our system took lithium. Ten percent of the patients started taking lithium based on 16 patients of data in a bad publication. And they call the Internet irresponsible. Here's the implication of what happens. There's this one guy, named Humberto, from Brazil, who unfortunately passed away nine months ago, who said, "Hey, listen. Can you help us answer this question? Because I don't want to wait for the next trial, it's going to be years. I want to know now. Can you help us?" So, we launched some tools, we let them track their blood levels. We let them share the data and exchange it. You know, a data network. And they said, you know, "Jamie, PLM, can you guys tell us whether this works or not?" And we went around and we talked to people, and they said, "You can't run a clinical trial like this. You know? You don't have the blinding, you don't have data, it doesn't follow the scientific method. It's never going to work. You can't do it." So, I said, "Okay well we can't do that. Then we can do something harder." (Laughter) I can't say whether lithium works in all ALS patients, but I can say whether it works in Humberto. I bought a Mac about two years ago, I converted over, and I was so excited about this new feature of the time machine that came in Leopard. And we said — because it's really cool, you can go back and you can look at the entire history of your computer, and find everything you've lost, and I loved it. And I said, "What if we built a time machine for patients, except instead of going backwards, we go forwards. Can we find out what's going to happen to you, so that you can maybe change it?" So, we did. We took all the patients like Humberto, That's the Apple background, we stole that because we didn't have time to build our own. This is a real app by the way. This is not just graphics. And you take those data, and we find the patients like him, and we bring their data together. And we bring their histories into it. And then we say, "Well how do we line them all up?" So, we line them all up so they go together around the meaningful points, integrated across everything we know about the patient. Full information, the entire course of their disease. And that's what is going to happen to Humberto, unless he does something. And he took lithium, and he went down the line. And it works almost every time. Now, the ones that it doesn't work are interesting. But almost all the time it works. It's actually scary. It's beautiful. So, we couldn't run a clinical trial, we couldn't figure it out. But we could see whether it was going to work for Humberto. And yeah, all the clinicians in the audience will talk about power and all the standard deviation. We'll do that later. But here is the answer of the mean of the patients that actually decided to take lithium. These are all the patients that started lithium. It's the Intent to Treat Curve. You can see here, the blue dots on the top, the light ones, those are the people in the study in PNAS that you wanted to be on. And the red ones are the ones, the pink ones on the bottom are the ones you didn't want to be. And the ones in the middle are all of our patients from the start of lithium at time zero, going forward, and then going backward. So, you can see we matched them perfectly, perfectly. Terrifyingly accurate matching. And going forward, you actually don't want to be a lithium patient this time. You're actually doing slightly worse — not significantly, but slightly worse. You don't want to be a lithium patient this time. But you know, a lot of people dropped out, the trial, there is too much drop out. Can we do the even harder thing? Can we go to the patients that actually decided to stay on lithium, because they were so convinced they were getting better? We asked our control algorithm, are those 69 patients — by the way, you'll notice that's four times the number of patients in the clinical trial — can we look at those patients and say, "Can we match them with our time machine to the other patients that are just like them, and what happens?" Even the ones that believed they were getting better matched the controls exactly. Exactly. Those little lines? That's the power. So, we — I can't tell you lithium doesn't work. I can't tell you that if you did it at a higher dose or if you run the study proper — I can tell you that for those 69 people that took lithium, they didn't do any better than the people that were just like them, just like me, and that we had the power to detect that at about a quarter of the strengths reported in the initial study. We did that one year ahead of the time when the first clinical trial funded by the NIH for millions of dollars failed for futility last week, and announced it. So, remember I told you about my brother's stem cell transplant. I never really knew whether it worked. And I put 100 million cells in his cisterna magna, in his lumbar cord, and filled out the IRBs and did all this work, and I never really knew. How did I not know? I mean, I didn't know what was going to happen to him. I actually asked Tim, who is the quant in our group — we actually searched for about a year to find someone who could do the sort of math and statistics and modeling in healthcare, couldn't find anybody. So, we went to the finance industry. And there are these guys who used to model the future of interest rates, and all that kind of stuff. And some of them were available. So, we hired one. (Laughter) We hired them, set them up, assisting at lab. I I.M. him things. That's the way I communicate with him, is like a little guy in a box. I I.M.ed Tim. I said, "Tim can you tell me whether my brother's stem cell transplant worked or not?" And he sent me this two days ago. It was that little outliers there. You see that guy that lived a long time? We have to go talk to him. Because I'd like to know what happened. Because something went different. But my brother didn't. My brother went straight down the line. It only works about 12 months. It's the first version of the time machine. First time we ever tried it. We'll try to get it better later but 12 months so far. And, you know, I look at this, and I get really emotional. You look at the patients, you can drill in all the controls, you can look at them, you can ask them. And I found a woman that had — we found her, she was odd because she had data after she died. And her husband had come in and entered her last functional scores, because he knew how much she cared. And I am thankful. I can't believe that these people, years after my brother had died, helped me answer the question about whether an operation I did, and spent millions of dollars on years ago, worked or not. I wished it had been there when I'd done it the first time, and I'm really excited that it's here now, because the lab that I founded has some data on a drug that might work, and I'd like to show it. I'd like to show it in real time, now, and I want to do that for all of the diseases that we can do that for. I've got to thank the 45,000 people that are doing this social experiment with us. There is an amazing journey we are going on to become human again, to be part of community again, to share of ourselves, to be vulnerable, and it's very exciting. So, thank you. (Applause)

A lab the size of a postage stamp

{0: "In his legendary career in chemistry, George Whitesides has been a pioneer in microfabrication and nanoscale self-assembly. Now, he's fabbing a diagnostic lab on a chip."}

TEDxBoston 2009

The problem I want to talk with you about is really the problem of: How does one supply health care in a world in which cost is everything? How do you do that? And the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you, I want to suggest to you, is one in which you say that in order to treat disease, you have to first know what you're treating, that's diagnostics, and then you have to do something. The program we're involved in is something we call "Diagnostics for All," or "zero-cost diagnostics." How do you provide medically relevant information at as close as possible to zero cost? How do you do it? Let me just give you two examples. The rigors of military medicine are not so dissimilar from the third world: poor resources, a rigorous environment — a series of problems — light weight and things of this kind. And also they're not so different from the home health care and diagnostic system world. So, the technology I want to talk about is for the third world, for the developing world, but it has, I think, much broader application, because information is so important in the health care system. So you see two examples here. One is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in Africa. The second is basically an entrepreneur who is set up and doing who-knows-what at a table in a market. I don't know what kind of health care is delivered there. But it's not really what is probably most efficient. What is our approach? The way in which one typically approaches a problem of lowering cost, starting from the perspective of the United States, is to take our solution, and then try to cut cost out of it. No matter how you do that, you're not going to start with a $100,000 instrument and bring it down to no cost. It isn't going to work. So the approach we took was the other way around, to ask: What is the cheapest possible stuff that you could make a diagnostic system out of, and get useful information and add function? And what we've chosen is paper. What you see here is a prototypic device. It's about a centimeter on the side. It's about the size of a fingernail. The lines around the edges are a polymer. It's made of paper. And paper, of course, wicks fluid, as you know, paper, cloth — drop wine on the tablecloth, and the wine wicks all over everything. Put it on your shirt, it ruins the shirt. That's what a hydrophilic surface does. So in this device, the idea is that you drip the bottom end of it in a drop of, in this case, urine. The fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top. The brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine, the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine. And the combination of those two is a first-order shot at a number of useful things that you want. So, this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper. Now, how simple can you make the production? Why do we choose paper? There's an example of the same thing on a finger, showing you basically what it looks like. One reason for using paper is that it's everywhere. We have made these kinds of devices using napkins and toilet paper and wraps, and all kinds of stuff. So the production capability is there. The second is, you can put lots and lots of tests in a very small place. I'll show you in a moment that the stack of paper there would probably hold something like 100,000 tests, something of that kind. And then finally, a point you don't think of so much in developed world medicine: it eliminates sharps. And what sharps means is needles, things that stick. If you've taken a sample of someone's blood and the someone might have hepatitis C, you don't want to make a mistake and stick it in you. You don't want to do that. So how do you dispose of that? It's a problem everywhere, and here, you simply burn it. So it's a sort of a practical approach to starting on things. Now, you say, "If paper is a good idea, other people have surely thought of it." And the answer is, of course, yes. Those half of you, roughly, who are women, at some point may have had a pregnancy test. And the most common of these is in a device that looks like the thing on the left. It's something called a lateral-flow immunoassay. In that particular test, urine, either containing a hormone called hCG, does or does not flow across a piece of paper. And there are two bars; one bar indicates that the test is working, and if the second bar shows up, you're pregnant. This is a terrific kind of test in a binary world, and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you're not pregnant; you're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort. So it works very well there, but it doesn't work very well when you need more quantitative information. There are also dipsticks, but if you look at the dipsticks, they're for another kind of urine analysis. There are an awful lot of colors and things like that. What do you actually do about that in a difficult circumstance? So the approach we started with is to ask: Is it really practical to make things of this sort? And that problem is now, in a purely engineering way, solved. And the procedure that we have is simply to start with paper. You run it through a new kind of printer called a wax printer. The wax printer does what looks like printing. It is printing. You put that on, you warm it a little bit, the wax prints through, so it absorbs into the paper, and you end up with the device you want. The printers cost 800 bucks now. We estimate that if you were to run them 24 hours a day, they'd make about 10 million tests a year. So it's a solved problem. That particular problem is solved. And there is an example of the kind of thing that you see. That's on a piece of 8 by 12 paper. That takes about two seconds to make. And so I regard that as done. There's a very important issue here, which is that because it's a printer, a color printer, it prints colors. That's what color printers do. I'll show you in a moment, that's actually quite useful. Now, the next question that you would like to ask is: What would you like to measure? What would you like to analyze? And the thing you'd most like to analyze, we're a fair distance from. It's what's called "fever of undiagnosed origin." Someone comes into the clinic, they have a fever, they feel bad. What do they have? Do they have TB? Do they have AIDS? Do they have a common cold? The triage problem. That's a hard problem for reasons I won't go through. There are an awful lot of things that you'd like to distinguish among. But then there are a series of things — AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, TB, others — and simpler ones, such as guidance of treatment. Now, even that's more complicated than you think. A friend of mine works in transcultural psychiatry, and he is interested in the question of why people do and don't take their meds. So Dapsone, or something like that, you have to take for a while. He has a wonderful story of talking to a villager in India and saying, "Have you taken your Dapsone?" "Yes." "Have you taken it every day?" "Yes." "Have you taken if for a month?" "Yes." What the guy actually meant was that he'd fed a 30-day dose of Dapsone to his dog that morning. (Laughter) And he was telling the truth, because in a different culture, the dog is a surrogate for you; "today," "this month," "since the rainy season" — there are lots of opportunities for misunderstanding. (Laughter) And so an issue here is to, in some cases, figure out how to deal with matters that seem uninteresting, like compliance. Now, take a look at what a typical test looks like. Prick a finger, you get some blood — about 50 microliters. That's about all you're going to get, because you can't use the usual sort of systems. You can't manipulate it very well; I'll show something about that in a moment. So you take the drop of blood, no further manipulations, you put it on a little device, the device filters out the blood cells, lets the serum go through, and you get a series of colors down in the bottom there. And the colors indicate "disease" or "normal." But even that's complicated, because to me, colors might indicate "normal," but after all, we're all suffering from probably an excess of education. What do you do about something which requires quantitative analysis? And so the solution that we and many other people are thinking about there, and at this point, there is a dramatic flourish, and out comes the universal solution to everything these days, which is a cell phone — in this particular case, a camera phone. They're everywhere — six billion a month in India. And the idea is that what one does is to take the device, you dip it, you develop the color, you take a picture, the picture goes to a central laboratory. You don't have to send out a doctor, you send out somebody who can just take the sample, and in the clinic either a doctor, or ideally, a computer in this case, does the analysis. Turns out to work actually quite well, particularly when your color printer has printed the color bars that indicate how things work. So my view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor, but an 18-year-old, otherwise unemployed, who has two things: a backpack full of these tests and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample, and an AK-47. And these are the things that get him through his day. (Laughter) There's another very interesting connection here, and that is, that what one wants to do is pass through useful information over what is generally a pretty awful telephone system. It turns out there's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject, which is the Mars Rover problem. How do you get back an accurate view of the color on Mars if you have a really terrible bandwidth to do it with? And the answer is not complicated, but it's one which I don't want to go through here, other than to say that the communication systems for doing this are really pretty well understood. Also, a fact which you may not know is that the compute capability of this thing is not so different from the compute capability of your desktop computer. This is a fantastic device which is only beginning to be tapped. I don't know whether the idea of one computer, one child makes any sense. Here's the computer of the future, because this screen is already there and they're ubiquitous. All right, let me show you just a little bit about advanced devices. And we'll start by posing a little problem. What you see here is another centimeter-sized device, and the different colors are different colors of dye. And you notice something which might strike you as a little bit interesting, which is, the yellow seems to disappear, get through the blue, and then get through the red. How does that happen? How do you make something flow through something? And, of course the answer is, "You don't." You make it flow under and over. But now the question is: How do you make it flow under and over in a piece of paper? The answer is that what you do — and the details are not terribly important here — is to make something more elaborate: You take several different layers of paper, each one containing its own little fluid system, and you separate them by pieces of, literally, double-sided carpet tape, the stuff you use to stick the carpets onto the floor. And the fluid will flow from one layer into the next. It distributes itself, flows through further holes, distributes itself. And what you see, at the lower right-hand side there, is a sample in which a single sample of blood has been put on the top, and it has gone through and distributed itself into these 16 holes on the bottom, in a piece of paper — basically, it looks like a chip, two pieces of paper thick. And in this particular case, we were just interested in the replicability of that. But that is, in principle, the way you solve the "fever of unexplained origin" problem, because each one of those spots then becomes a test for a particular set of markers of disease, and this will work in due course. Here is an example of a slightly more complicated device. There's the chip. You dip in a corner. The fluid goes into the center. It distributes itself out into these various wells or holes and turns color, all done with paper and carpet tape. So it's, I think, as low-cost as we're likely to be able to come up and make things. Now, I have two last little stories to tell you in finishing off this business. This is one: One of the things you occasionally need to do is separate blood cells from serum. And the question was, here we do it by taking a sample, we put it in a centrifuge, we spin it, and you get blood cells out. Terrific. What happens if you don't have electricity, a centrifuge, and whatever? And we thought for a while of how you might do this, and the way, in fact, you do it, is what's shown here. You get an eggbeater, which is everywhere, and you saw off a blade, and then you take tubing, and you stick it on that. You put the blood in, somebody sits there and spins it. It works really, really well. And we sat down, we did the physics of eggbeaters and self-aligning tubes and all the rest of that kind of thing, and sent it off to a journal. We were very proud of this, particularly the title, which was "Eggbeater as Centrifuge." (Laughter) And we sent it off, and by return mail, it came back. I called up the editor and I said, "What's going on? How is this possible?" The editor said, with enormous disdain, "I read this. And we're not going to publish it, because we only publish science." (Laughter) And it's an important issue, because it means that we have to, as a society, think about what we value. And if it's just papers and Phys. Rev. letters, we've got a problem. Here is another example of something which is — this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample. The neat thing about this is, you have a light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this system in broad daylight. It performs about equivalently to a system that's on the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? The answer is: How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that? Interesting problem. So, let me finish by saying that we've thought about this as a kind of engineering problem. And we've asked: What is the scientific unifying idea here? And we've decided we should think about this not so much in terms of cost, but in terms of simplicity. Simplicity is a neat word. You've got to think about what simplicity means. I know what it is, but I don't actually know what it means. So I actually was interested enough in this to put together several groups of people. The most recent involved a couple of people at MIT, one of them being an exceptionally bright kid who is one of the very few people I would think of who's an authentic genius. We all struggled for an entire day to think about simplicity. And I want to give you the answer of this deep scientific thought. [What is simplicity? "It's impossible to f..k it up"] (Laughter) So, in a sense, you get what you pay for. Thank you very much. (Applause)

A new strategy in the war on cancer

{0: 'Although a highly-accomplished conventional doctor, David Agus has embraced the future of medicine and is constantly exploring ways that new technologies can help in the fight against cancer. '}

TEDMED 2009

I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy. And so, as a cancer doctor, you look at this, and you get a little bit downhearted. But when you start to read the article by Cliff, who himself is a cancer survivor, who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from New York City to upstate New York to get an experimental therapy for — at the time — Hodgkin's disease, which saved his life, he makes remarkable points here. And the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology, in our view of cancer. For the last 50 years, we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer, not in controlling cancer. So, this is an astounding table. And this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that, obviously, we've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease, but look at cancer. The death rate in cancer in over 50 years hasn't changed. We've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia, where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission, but in general, we haven't made an impact at all in the war on cancer. So, what I'm going to tell you today, is a little bit of why I think that's the case, and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where I think it's going, where a new approach — that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer. Because this is wrong. So, what is cancer, first of all? Well, if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value, you go to a doctor, they stick a needle in. They way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition: Does it look normal? Does it look abnormal? So, that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle. This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell. That is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer. There's no molecular test, there's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday, there's no fancy looking at the chromosomes. This is the state-of-the-art and how we do it. You know, I know very well, as a cancer doctor, I can't treat advanced cancer. So, as an aside, I firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early. It is the only way you can start to fight cancer, is by catching it early. We can prevent most cancers. You know, the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease. We could do the same in cancer. I co-founded a company called Navigenics, where, if you spit into a tube — and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease, all of which are delayable in many of the cancers — you start to identify what you could get, and then we can start to work to prevent them. Because the problem is, when you have advanced cancer, we can't do that much today about it, as the statistics allude to. So, the thing about cancer is that it's a disease of the aged. Why is it a disease of the aged? Because evolution doesn't care about us after we've had our children. See, evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then, after age 35 or 40 or 45, it said "It doesn't matter anymore, because they've had their progeny." So if you look at cancers, it is very rare — extremely rare — to have cancer in a child, on the order of thousands of cases a year. As one gets older? Very, very common. Why is it hard to treat? Because it's heterogeneous, and that's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer. It starts to select out for those bad, aggressive cells, what we call clonal selection. But, if we start to understand that cancer isn't just a molecular defect, it's something more, then we'll get to new ways of treating it, as I'll show you. So, one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that, right now, we describe it by a number of adjectives, symptoms: "I'm tired, I'm bloated, I have pain, etc." You then have some anatomic descriptions, you get that CT scan: "There's a three centimeter mass in the liver." You then have some body part descriptions: "It's in the liver, in the breast, in the prostate." And that's about it. So, our dictionary for describing cancer is very, very poor. It's basically symptoms. It's manifestations of a disease. What's exciting is that over the last two or three years, the government has spent 400 million dollars, and they've allocated another billion dollars, to what we call the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. So, it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer, and giving us a new lexicon, a new dictionary to describe it. You know, in the mid-1850's in France, they started to describe cancer by body part. That hasn't changed in over 150 years. It is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate, by breast, by muscle. It makes no sense, if you think about it. So, obviously, the technology is here today, and, over the next several years, that will change. You will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic. You will go to a HER2 amplified clinic, or an EGFR activated clinic, and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer. So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, "This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it." When one is exposed to H1N1, you take Tamiflu, and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease. Why? Because we know what you have, and we know how to treat it — although we can't make vaccine in this country, but that's a different story. The Cancer Genome Atlas is coming out now. The first cancer was done, which was brain cancer. In the next month, the end of December, you'll see ovarian cancer, and then lung cancer will come several months after. There's also a field of proteomics that I'll talk about in a few minutes, which I think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease. But remember, I'm not pushing genomics, proteomics, to be a reductionist. I'm doing it so we can identify what we're up against. And there's a very important distinction there that we'll get to. In health care today, we spend most of the dollars — in terms of treating disease — most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. We spend very little, if any, dollars in terms of identifying what we're up against. If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do things a hell of a lot better. If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we can take it enormously the other direction, and obviously, that's where we need to go, going forward. So, this is the website of the National Cancer Institute. And I'm here to tell you, it's wrong. So, the website of the National Cancer Institute says that cancer is a genetic disease. The website says, "If you look, there's an individual mutation, and maybe a second, and maybe a third, and that is cancer." But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see. This isn't a genetic disease. So, there you see, it's a liver with colon cancer in it, and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded. You see a CT scan where cancer is in the liver. Cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment. It's not in the abstract; it's the interaction with the environment. It's what we call a system. The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. And I think that's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. The goal is to control cancer. And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us. I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, "We've made a mistake. We've all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. We need to take a step back." And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. People got upset, but this is the only way we're going to go forward. You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. I said, "Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers?" And he was saying: Does he really want to meet another doctor? But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it's been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling — and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team — the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system. And I'll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it. The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, "What was the average temperature?" and it came back at 98.7, I would say, "Great." But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I would totally miss it. So, one of the problems, the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and I, and all of us, we go to our doctor once a year. We have discrete data elements; we don't have a time function on them. Earlier it was referred to this direct life device. You know, I've been using it for two and a half months. It's a staggering device, not because it tells me how many kilocalories I do every day, but because it looks, over 24 hours, what I've done in a day. And I didn't realize that for three hours I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm not moving at all. And a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them, because we're not measuring them dynamically. And so, if you think of cancer as a system, there's an input and an output and a state in the middle. So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations. The output are our symptoms: Do we have pain? Is the cancer growing? Do we feel bloated, etc.? Most of that state is hidden. So what we do in our field is we change and input, we give aggressive chemotherapy, and we say, "Did that output get better? Did that pain improve, etc.?" And so, the problem is that it's not just one system, it's multiple systems on multiple scales. It's a system of systems. And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope. A neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here, but when you start to put them together in a complex system, and you start to see that it becomes a brain, and that brain can create intelligence, what we're talking about in the body, and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system. Well, the bad news is that these robust — and robust is a key word — emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail. The good news is you can manipulate them. You can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component. One of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer. So, about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get. They had gotten their chemotherapy, and then they randomized them, where half got placebo, and half got a drug called Zoledronic acid that builds bone. It's used to treat osteoporosis, and they got that twice a year. They looked and, in these 1,800 women, given twice a year a drug that builds bone, you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent. Reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that doesn't even touch the cancer. So the notion, you change the soil, the seed doesn't grow as well. You change that system, and you could have a marked effect on the cancer. Nobody has ever shown — and this will be shocking — nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell. It's never been shown. There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body. If I give a woman with breast cancer a drug called Taxol every three weeks, which is the standard, about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug. And a response is 50 percent shrinkage. Well, remember that's not even an order of magnitude, but that's a different story. They then recur, I give them that same drug every week. Another 30 percent will respond. They then recur, I give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion, another 20 or 30 percent will respond. So, you can't tell me it's working by the same mechanism in all three size. It's not. We have no idea the mechanism. So the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system, just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence, chemotherapy may work by that same exact way. The wild thing about that trial also, was that it reduced new primaries, so new cancers, by 30 percent also. So, the problem is, yours and mine, all of our systems are changing. They're dynamic. I mean, this is a scary slide, not to take an aside, but it looks at obesity in the world. And I'm sorry if you can't read the numbers, they're kind of small. But, if you start to look at it, that red, that dark color there, more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese. Look a decade ago, look two decades ago: markedly different. So, our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago. So the diseases we have today, which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades, are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this. So, this picture, although it is beautiful, is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome. So this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet, and we're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body. We can start to see that system. Each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified. The power of these magnets, the power of what we can do here, is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology. So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before. So, instead of a reductionist view, we're taking a step back. So this is a woman, 46 years old, who had recurrent lung cancer. It was in her brain, in her lungs, in her liver. She had gotten Carboplatin Taxol, Carboplatin Taxotere, Gemcitabine, Navelbine: Every drug we have she had gotten, and that disease continued to grow. She had three kids under the age of 12, and this is her CT scan. And so what this is, is we're taking a cross-section of her body here, and you can see in the middle there is her heart, and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her, untreated, in a matter of weeks. She goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway, and again, I'm not sure if this pathway was in the system, in the cancer, but it targeted a pathway, and a month later, pow, that cancer's gone. Six months later it's still gone. That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne. That's about it. So, the problem is that the clinical trial was done, and we were a part of it, and in the fundamental clinical trial — the pivotal clinical trial we call the Phase Three, we refused to use a placebo. Would you want your mother, your brother, your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live? And the answer, obviously, is not. So, it was done on this group of patients. Ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here, and the drug went to the FDA, and the FDA said, "Without a placebo, how do I know patients actually benefited from the drug?" So the morning the FDA was going to meet, this was the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. (Laughter) And so, what do you know, that drug was approved. The amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial, where they gave half placebo and half the drug. And we learned something important there. What's interesting is they did it in South America and Canada, where it's "more ethical to give placebos." They had to give it also in the U.S. to get approval, so I think there were three U.S. patients in upstate New York who were part of the trial. But they did that, and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo. So it challenged everything we knew in cancer, is that you don't need to get a response. You don't need to shrink the disease. If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease. The problem is that, if I'm this doc, and I get your CT scan today and you've got a two centimeter mass in your liver, and you come back to me in three months and it's three centimeters, did that drug help you or not? How do I know? Would it have been 10 centimeters, or am I giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost? So, it's a fundamental problem. And, again, that's where these new technologies can come in. And so, the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor's office — well, the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease, right? The ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening. That is the most effective, cost-effective, best way we can do things today. But if one is unfortunate to get a disease, you'll go into your doctor's office, he or she will take a drop of blood, and we will start to know how to treat your disease. The way we've approached it is the field of proteomics, again, this looking at the system. It's taking a big picture. The problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body, there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins. So, there's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude. And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software. We can start to look at different components along this spectrum. And so, earlier was talked about cross-discipline, about collaboration. And I think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in. Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute announced a new program called the Physical Sciences and Oncology, where physicists, mathematicians, are brought in to think about cancer, people who never approached it before. Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem. A whole new approach, instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms, to try to bring technology to get a picture of what's actually happening in the body. So, just for two seconds, how these technologies work — because I think it's important to understand it. What happens is every protein in your body is charged, so the proteins are sprayed in, the magnet spins them around, and then there's a detector at the end. When it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge. And so we can accurately — if the magnet is big enough, and your resolution is high enough — you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system. And so, as a cancer doctor, instead of having paper in my chart, in your chart, and it being this thick, this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices, where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data. Electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease. And certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward, instead of just having encounter and encounter, without fundamental learning. So, to conclude, we need to get away from reductionist thinking. We need to start to think differently and radically. And so, I implore everyone here: Think differently. Come up with new ideas. Tell them to me or anyone else in our field, because over the last 59 years, nothing has changed. We need a radically different approach. You know, Andy Grove stepped down as chairman of the board at Intel — and Andy was one of my mentors, tough individual. When Andy stepped down, he said, "No technology will win. Technology itself will win." And I'm a firm believer, in the field of medicine and especially cancer, that it's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term. Thank you very much.

The painter and the pendulum

{0: "Tom Shannon's mixed-material sculpture seems to levitate -- often it actually does -- thanks to powerful magnets and clever arrangements of suspension wire. He designed the TED Prize trophy. ", 1: 'Journalist and commentator John Hockenberry has reported from all over the world in virtually every medium. He\'s the author of "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence."'}

TED in the Field

John Hockenberry: It's great to be here with you, Tom. And I want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since I first became familiar with your work. In you work there's always this kind of hybrid quality of a natural force in some sort of interplay with creative force. Are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work? Tom Shannon: Yeah, the subject matter that I'm looking for, it's usually to solve a question. I had the question popped into my head: What does the cone that connects the sun and the Earth look like if you could connect the two spheres? And in proportion, what would the size of the sphere and the length, and what would the taper be to the Earth? And so I went about and made that sculpture, turning it out of solid bronze. And I did one that was about 35 feet long. The sun end was about four inches in diameter, and then it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the Earth end. And so for me, it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context, as though you were an astronaut, and see these two things as an object, because they are so intimately bound, and one is meaningless without the other. JH: Is there a relief in playing with these forces? And I'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces. TS: Well, like the magnetically levitated objects — like that silver one there, that was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets, trying to find a way to make something float with the least possible connection to the ground. So I got it down to just one tether to be able to support that. JH: Now is this electromagnetic here, or are these static? TS: Those are permanent magnets, yeah. JH: Because if the power went out, there would just be a big noise. TS: Yeah. It's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art. JH: I agree. TS: The magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism, so it's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything. The sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets and the Earth's magnetic field protects us from the sun. So there's this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe. But with the pendulum, it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up. My sculptures are normally very simplified. I try to refine them down to very simple forms. But the paintings become very complex, because I think the fields that are supporting them, they're billowing, and they're interpenetrating, and they're interference patterns. JH: And they're non-deterministic. I mean, you don't know necessarily where you're headed when you begin, even though the forces can be calculated. So the evolution of this — I gather this isn't your first pendulum. TS: No. (JH: No.) TS: The first one I did was in the late 70's, and I just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it. I threw it into an orbit, and it only had one color, and when it got to the center, the paint kept running out, so I had to run in there, didn't have any control over the spigot remotely. So that told me right away: I need a remote control device. But then I started dreaming of having six colors. I sort of think about it as the DNA — these colors, the red, blue, yellow, the primary colors and white and black. And if you put them together in different combinations — just like printing in a sense, like how a magazine color is printed — and put them under certain forces, which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them, these amazing things started appearing. JH: It looks like we're loaded for bear here. TS: Yeah, well let's put a couple of canvases. I'll ask a couple of my sons to set up the canvases here. I want to just say — so this is Jack, Nick and Louie. JH: Thanks guys. TS: So here are the — JH: All right, I'll get out of the way here. TS: I'm just going to throw this into an orbit and see if I can paint everybody's shoes in the front. (Laughter) JH: Whoa. That is ... ooh, nice. TS: So something like this. I'm doing this as a demo, and it's more playful, but inevitably, all of this can be used. I can redeem this painting, just continuing on, doing layers upon layers. And I keep it around for a couple of weeks, and I'm contemplating it, and I'll do another session with it and bring it up to another level, where all of this becomes the background, the depth of it. JH: That's fantastic. So the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-controlled airplane valves. TS: Yes, they're servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes. And they can pinch them very tight and stop it, or you can have them wide open. And all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom. You can always be changing colors, put aluminum paint, or I could put anything into this. It could be tomato sauce, or anything could be dispensed — sand, powders or anything like that. JH: So many forces there. You've got gravity, you've got the centrifugal force, you've got the fluid dynamics. Each of these beautiful paintings, are they images in and of themselves, or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas? TS: Well, this painting here, I wanted to do something very simple, a simple, iconic image of two ripples interfering. So the one on the right was done first, and then the one on the left was done over it. And then I left gaps so you could see the one that was done before. And then when I did the second one, it really disturbed the piece — these big blue lines crashing through the center of it — and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap. There are lines in front of the one on the right, and there are lines behind the one on the left, and so it takes it into different planes. What it's also about, just the little events, the events of the interpenetration of — JH: Two stars, or — TS: Two things that happened — there's an interference pattern, and then a third thing happens. There are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening, and I'm very interested in that. Like the occurrence of moire patterns. Like this green one, this is a painting I did about 10 years ago, but it has some — see, in the upper third — there are these moires and interference patterns that are radio kind of imagery. And that's something that in painting I've never seen done. I've never seen a representation of a kind of radio interference patterns, which are so ubiquitous and such an important part of our lives. JH: Is that a literal part of the image, or is my eye making that interference pattern — is my eye completing that interference pattern? TS: It is the paint actually, makes it real. It's really manifested there. If I throw a very concentric circle, or concentric ellipse, it just dutifully makes these evenly spaced lines, which get closer and closer together, which describes how gravity works. There's something very appealing about the exactitude of science that I really enjoy. And I love the shapes that I see in scientific observations and apparatus, especially astronomical forms and the idea of the vastness of it, the scale, is very interesting to me. My focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology. Some of these paintings, when you look at them very close, odd things appear that really look like horses or birds or crocodiles, elephants. There are lots of things that appear. When you look into it, it's sort of like looking at cloud patterns, but sometimes they're very modeled and highly rendered. And then there are all these forms that we don't know what they are, but they're equally well-resolved and complex. So I think, conceivably, those could be predictive. Because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we're familiar with in biology, it's also making other forms that we're not familiar with. And maybe it's the kind of forms we'll discover underneath the surface of Mars, where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface. JH: Oh, let's hope so. Oh, my God, let's. Oh, please, yes. Oh, I'm so there. You know, it seems at this stage in your life, you also very personally are in this state of confrontation with a sort of dissonant — I suppose it's an electromagnetic force that somehow governs your Parkinson's and this creative force that is both the artist who is in the here and now and this sort of arc of your whole life. Is that relevant to your work? TS: As it turns out, this device kind of comes in handy, because I don't have to have the fine motor skills to do, that I can operate slides, which is more of a mental process. I'm looking at it and making decisions: It needs more red, it needs more blue, it needs a different shape. And so I make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much, much simpler way. I mean, I've got the symptoms. I guess Parkinson's kind of creeps up over the years, but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms. In my case, my left hand has a significant tremor and my left leg also. I'm left-handed, and so I draw. All my creations really start on small drawings, which I have thousands of, and it's my way of just thinking. I draw with a simple pencil, and at first, the Parkinson's was really upsetting, because I couldn't get the pencil to stand still. JH: So you're not a gatekeeper for these forces. You don't think of yourself as the master of these forces. You think of yourself as the servant. TS: Nature is — well, it's a godsend. It just has so much in it. And I think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature, humans are of the universe. The universe is in our mind, and our minds are in the universe. And we are expressions of the universe, basically. As humans, ultimately being part of the universe, we're kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe. And to interface with it, with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do, giving them pigment and paint just like an artist, it's a good ally. It's a terrific studio assistant. JH: Well, I love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control with the traditional skills that you have with your hand, some sort of more elemental force gets revealed, and that's the beauty here. Tom, thank you so much. It's been really, really great. TS: Thank you, John. (Applause)

How to expose the corrupt

{0: "As a director of the World Bank in Nairobi, Peter Eigen saw firsthand how devastating corruption can be. He's founder of Transparency International, an NGO that works to persuade international companies not to bribe."}

TEDxBerlin

I am going to speak about corruption, but I would like to juxtapose two different things. One is the large global economy, the large globalized economy, and the other one is the small, and very limited, capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern, to shape, this economy. Because there is this asymmetry, which creates, basically, failing governance. Failing governance in many areas: in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment, in the area of exploitation of women and children, in the area of climate change, in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy, which is operating in a worldwide arena. And I think corruption, and the fight against corruption, and the impact of corruption, is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance. Let me talk about my own experience. I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa. At that time, I noticed that corruption, that grand corruption, that systematic corruption, was undermining everything we were trying to do. And therefore, I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank, our own projects, our own programs against corruption, but in general, I thought, "We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption." And as soon as I started this work, I received a memorandum from the World Bank, from the legal department first, in which they said, "You are not allowed to do this. You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries. This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank, so I want you to stop your doings." In the meantime, I was chairing donor meetings, for instance, in which the various donors, and many of them like to be in Nairobi — it is true, it is one of the unsafest cities of the world, but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable. And in these donor meetings, I noticed that many of the worst projects — which were put forward by our clients, by the governments, by promoters, many of them representing suppliers from the North — that the worst projects were realized first. Let me give you an example: a huge power project, 300 million dollars, to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable, and one of the most beautiful, areas of western Kenya. And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits: It had no clients, nobody would buy the electricity there, nobody was interested in irrigation projects. To the contrary, we knew that this project would destroy the environment: It would destroy riparian forests, which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups, the Samburu and the Turkana in this area. So everybody knew this is a, not a useless project, this is an absolute damaging, a terrible project — not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars, and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools, like hospitals and so on. And yet, we all rejected this project, none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it, and it was the first project to be implemented. The good projects, which we as a donor community would take under our wings, they took years, you know, you had too many studies, and very often they didn't succeed. But these bad projects, which were absolutely damaging — for the economy for many generations, for the environment, for thousands of families who had to be resettled — they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks, of supplier agencies, of insurance agencies — like in Germany, Hermes, and so on — and they came back very, very quickly, driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North. Now, these suppliers were our big companies. They were the actors of this global market, which I mentioned in the beginning. They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large-scale corruption. We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here, or 100,000 dollars there, or one million dollars there. No, we are talking about 10 million, 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts, on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein, of the president's ministers, the high officials in the para-statal sectors. This was the reality which I saw, and not only one project like that: I saw, I would say, over the years I worked in Africa, I saw hundreds of projects like this. And so, I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries, which is the main reason for the misery, for the poverty, for the conflicts, for the violence, for the desperation in many of these countries. That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line, that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world, twice that number, more than two billion people without sanitation and so on, and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children, still, child mortality of more than 10 million people every year, children dying before they are five years old: The cause of this is, to a large extent, grand corruption. Now, why did the World Bank not let me do this work? I found out afterwards, after I left, under a big fight, the World Bank. The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay, including Germany. In Germany, foreign bribery was allowed. It was even tax-deductible. No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed. Not all of them, but most of them. And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance, because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin, at the Villa Borsig, we were told, "You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing, because we will lose our contracts. We will lose to the French, we will lose to the Swedes, we'll lose to the Japanese." And therefore, there was a indeed a prisoner's dilemma, which made it very difficult for an individual company, an individual exporting country to say, "We are not going to continue this deadly, disastrous habit of large companies to bribe." So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, "We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad." They needed help, and the large companies themselves have this dilemma. Many of them didn't want to bribe. Many of the German companies, for instance, believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price, so they are very competitive. They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are, but they were not allowed to show their strengths, because the world was eaten up by grand corruption. And this is why I'm telling you this: Civil society rose to the occasion. We had this small NGO, Transparency International. They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner's dilemma, and we developed concepts of collective action, basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table, explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing, and to make a long story short, we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters. In 1997, a convention, under the auspices of the OECD, which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery. (Applause) Well, thank you. I mean, it's interesting, in doing this, we had to sit together with the companies. We had here in Berlin, at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee, we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry, and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery. In the first session — we had three sessions over the course of two years. And President von Weizsäcker, by the way, chaired one of the sessions, the first one, to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs, who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations. And in the first session, they all said, "This is not bribery, what we are doing." This is customary there. This is what these other cultures demand. They even applaud it. In fact, [unclear] still says this today. And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing. But in the second session, they admitted already that they would never do this, what they are doing in these other countries, here in Germany, or in the U.K., and so on. Cabinet ministers would admit this. And in the final session, at the Aspen Institute, we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government, at the time, requesting that they participate in the OECD convention. And this is, in my opinion, an example of soft power, because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us. We had a longer-term time perspective. We had a broader, geographically much wider, constituency we were trying to defend. And that's why the law has changed. That's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that's why MIN is in the trouble they are in. In some other countries, the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced. And, again, civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment. In London, for instance, where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case, which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute, 100 million British pounds, every year for ten years, to one particular official of one particular friendly country, who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment. This case, they are not prosecuting in the UK. Why? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain. Civil society is pushing, civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem, also in the U.K., and also in Japan, which is not properly enforcing, and so on. In Germany, we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention, which is a subsequent convention. We are, Germany, is not ratifying. Why? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies. In Germany, we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant, but you are allowed to bribe a deputy. This is, under German law, allowed, and the members of our parliament don't want to change this, and this is why they can't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery — one of they very, very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world, but not able to ratify the convention, which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world. I see my time is ticking. Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened. I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption, one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance. By now, the United Nations is totally on our side. The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus; under Wolfensohn, they became, I would say, the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world. Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on. And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem, in the development of remedies, in the implementation of reforms, and then later, in the monitoring of reforms. Of course, if civil society organizations want to play that role, they have to grow into this responsibility. Not all civil society organizations are good. The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO. So, we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself. They have to have a much more transparent financial governance. They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations. We also need much more competence of civil society leaders. This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society. But what I'm saying from my very practical experience: If civil society does it right and joins the other actors — in particular, governments, governments and their international institutions, but also large international actors, in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility — then in this magical triangle between civil society, government and private sector, there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world. Thank you. (Applause)

Teach every child about food

{0: "Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children. The winner of the 2010 TED Prize, he's on a mission to teach every family about eating better and living healthier lives. "}

TED2010

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat. My name's Jamie Oliver. I'm 34 years old. I'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I'm not a doctor; I'm a chef, I don't have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education. I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you're at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? Put your hands up. You can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well. Most of you. OK. We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. You lot, you're all right, but we'll get you eventually, don't worry. (Laughter) The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake. Right? (Laughter) (Applause) Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. Fact: diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. This is a global problem. It's a catastrophe. It's sweeping the world. England is right behind you, as usual. (Laughter) I know they were close, but not that close. We need a revolution. Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. Think about smoking. It costs way less than obesity now. Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health-care bills, 150 billion dollars a year. In 10 years, it's set to double: 300 billion dollars a year. Let's be honest, guys, you haven't got that cash. (Laughter) I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. We need it. The time is now. We're in a tipping-point moment. I've been doing this for seven years. I've been trying in America for seven years. Now is the time when it's ripe — ripe for the picking. I went to the eye of the storm. I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America. Or it was last year. We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season. (Laughter) Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we've become so used to. I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about: your public, your children. I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She's 16 years old. She's got six years to live because of the food that she's eaten. She's the third generation of Americans that hasn't grown up within a food environment where they've been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom's mom. She has six years to live. She's eating her liver to death. Stacy, the Edwards family. This is a normal family, guys. Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or at school. The family's obese. Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds. He gets bullied, for God's sake. The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old. She's obese before she even gets to primary school. Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot. But you know what? Her father, who was obese, died in her arms, And then the second most important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity, and now her step-dad is obese. You see, the thing is, obesity and diet-related disease doesn't just hurt the people that have it; it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters. Pastor Steve: an inspirational man, one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. He's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem. He has to bury the people, OK? And he's fed up with it. He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community. Come winter, three times as many people die. He's sick of it. This is preventable disease. Waste of life. By the way, this is what they get buried in. We're not geared up to do this. Can't even get them out the door, and I'm being serious. Can't even get them there. Forklift. OK, I see it as a triangle, OK? This is our landscape of food. I need you to understand it. You've probably heard all this before. Over the last 30 years, what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country? Let's be frank and honest. Well, modern-day life. Let's start with the Main Street. Fast food has taken over the whole country; we know that. The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers, in this country. (Sighs) Supermarkets as well. Big companies. Big companies. Thirty years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. Labeling is a massive problem. The labeling in this country is a disgrace. The industry wants to self-police themselves. What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it. How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar? Home. The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food culture, what made our society. That is not happening anymore. And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically — step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. It hasn't happened for 30 years, OK? I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now; the Edwards family. (Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk. This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week. And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. How are you feeling? Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn't going to get them there. But I'm killing them. JO: Yes you are. You are. But we can stop that. Normal. Let's get on schools, something that I'm fairly much a specialist in. OK, school. What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? School food is something that most kids — 31 million a day, actually — have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances. (Laughter) Before I crack into my rant, which I'm sure you're waiting for — (Laughter) I need to say one thing, and it's so important in, hopefully, the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America — I offer myself as their ambassador. I'm not slagging them off. They're doing the best they can do. They're doing their best. But they're doing what they're told, and what they're being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants; there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. There's a problem: If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and write different things around things. If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit. Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it's highly processed, there's not enough fresh food in there at all. You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn't believe — there's not enough veggies at all. French fries are considered a vegetable. Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get crockery. Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous. They have scissors in the classroom, but knives and forks? No. And the way I look at it is: If you don't have knives and forks in your school, you're purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld. And yes, by the way, it is fast food: It's sloppy Joes, it's burgers, it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff. (Sighs) Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it's going to double. We're not teaching our kids. There's no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school, OK? We don't teach kids about food, right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England. (Video) Who knows what this is? Child: Potatoes. Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is? Child: Broccoli? JO: What about this? Our good old friend. Child: Celery. JO: No. What do you think this is? Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No. JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense of "Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?" Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear? JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know. JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is, then they will never eat it. (Laughter) JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Two one-hour sessions. We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period. (Applause) I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys, OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch, right? They'll be having two bottles, OK? And most kids do. But milk ain't good enough anymore. Don't get me wrong, I support milk — but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings, colorings and sugar in milk, more kids will drink it. Yeah. Obviously now that's going to catch on the apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there isn't any need to flavor the milk. Okay? There's sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It's in everything. Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems. There's our milk. There's our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We've got one kid, here — having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there's your week. There's your month. And I've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That's my belief. (Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That's the good news. It's very, very preventable. So, let's just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, "In 10 years' time, the history of your children's lives, happiness — and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well, you know you're going to live longer — all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?" So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It's the future. It's the only way. Fast food. With the fast-food industry you know, it's very competitive. I've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean, basically they've weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them, right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients. Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah? (Applause) Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills. (Applause) That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter. The workplace, we haven't really talked about it. You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staff are the moms and dads of America's children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn't be left out. Let's go back to the home. Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it's so achievable. You can care and be commercial. Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me, it's quite romantic, but it's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that's the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We've got to put back what's been lost. Huntington's Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, we've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen. Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school. (Applause) That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it's people on people. You know, it's local cooks teaching local people. It's free cooking lessons, guys, in the Main Street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools — farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education — there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do. (Applause) And look, I know it's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is: I care. I'm a father, and I love this country. And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, other people will follow. It's incredibly important. (Audience) Yeah! (Applause) When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren't, I thought "If I had a magic wand, what would I do?" And I thought, "You know what? I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America." And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I'm here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I'm a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause continues)

Augmented-reality maps

{0: 'Blaise Agüera y Arcas works on machine learning at Google. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, he has worked on augmented reality, mapping, wearable computing and natural user interfaces.'}

TED2010

About a year and a half ago, Stephen Lawler, who also gave a talk here at TED in 2007 on Virtual Earth, brought me over to become the architect of Bing Maps, which is Microsoft's online-mapping effort. In the past two and a half, we've been very hard at work on redefining the way maps work online. And we really are seeing this in very different terms from the kind of mapping and direction site that one is used to. So, the first thing that you might notice about the mapping site is just the fluidity of the zooming and the panning, which, if you're familiar at all with Seadragon, that's where it comes from. Mapping is, of course, not just about cartography, it's also about imagery. So, as we zoom-in beyond a certain level this resolves into a kind of Sim City-like virtual view at 45 degrees. This can be viewed from any of the cardinal directions to show you the 3D structure of the city, all the facades. Now, we see this space, this three-dimensional environment, as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out, and map's directions are really just one of them. If you click on this, you'll see some of the ones that we've put out, just in the past couple of months since we've launched. So, for example, a couple of days after the disaster in Haiti, we had an earthquake map that showed before and after pictures from the sky. This wonderful one which I don't have time to show you is taking hyper-local blogs in real time and mapping those stories, those entries to the places that are referred to on the blogs. It's wonderful. But I'm going to show you some more candy sort of stuff. So, we see the imagery, of course, not stopping at the sky. These little green bubbles represent photosynths that users have made. I'm not going to dive into them either, but photosynths are integrated into the map. Everything that's cased in blue is an area where we've taken imagery on the ground as well. And so, when you fly down — (Applause) Thank you. When you fly down to the ground, and you see this kind of panoramic imagery, the first thing that you might notice is that it's not just a picture, there's just as much three-dimensional understanding of this environment as there is of the three-dimensional city from above, so if I click on something to get a closer view of it, then, the fact that that transition looks as it does, is a function of all of that geometry, all of that 3D understanding behind this model. Now, I'll show you a fun app that — we've been working on a collaboration with our friends at Flickr. This takes Flickr, georegistered imagery and uses photosynth-like processes to connect that imagery to our imagery, so — I'm not sure if that's the one I actually meant to pull up, but — (Laughter) But notice — this is, of course, a popular tourist site, and there are lots of photos around here, and these photos are all taken at different times. So this one was taken around five. So that's the Flickr photo, that's our imagery. So you really see how this kind of crowd-sourced imagery is integrating, in a very deep way, into the map itself. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) There are several reasons why this is interesting and one of them, of course, is time travel. And I'm not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here, but there are some with horses and carriages and so on as well. But what's cool about this is that, not only is it augmenting this visual representation of the world with things that are coming in from users, but it also is the foundation for augmented reality, and that's something that I'll be showing you more of in just a moment. Now I just made a transition indoors. That's also interesting. OK, notice there's now a roof above us. We're inside the Pike Place Market. And this is something that we're able to do with a backpack camera, so, we're now not only imaging in the street with this camera on tops of cars, but we're also imaging inside. And from here, we're able to do the same sorts of registration, not only of still images, but also of video. So this is something that we're now going to try for the first time, live, and this is really, truly, very frightening. (Laughter) OK. (Ringing) All right, guys, are you there? (Noise) All right. I'm hitting it. I'm punching play. I'm live. All right. There we go. So, these are our friends in Pike Place Market, the lab. (Applause) So they're broadcasting this live. OK, George, can you pan back over to the corner market? Because I want to show points of interest. No, no. The other way. Yeah, yeah, back to the corner, back to the corner. I don't want to see you guys yet. OK, OK, back to the corner, back to the corner, back to the corner. OK, never mind. What I wanted to show you was these points of interest over here on top of the image because what that gives you a sense of is the way, if you're actually on the spot, you can think about this — this is taking a step in addition to augmented reality. What the hell are you guys — oh, sorry. (Laughter) We're doing two different — OK, I'm hanging up now. We're doing two different things here. One of them is to take that real ... (Laughter) All right, let me just take a moment and thank the team. They've done a fantastic job of pulling this together. (Applause) I'm going to abandon them now and walk back outside. And while I walk outside, I'll just mention that here we're using this for telepresence, but you can equally well use this on the spot, for augmented reality. When you use it on the spot, it means that you're able to bring all of that metadata and information about the world to you. So here, we're taking the extra step of also broadcasting it. That was being broadcast, by the way, on a 4G network from the market. All right, and now there's one last TED talk that Microsoft has given in the past several years. And that's Curtis Wong, WorldWide Telescope. So, we're going to head over to the dumpsters, where it's traditional, after a long day at the market, to go out for a break, but also stare up at the sky. This is the integration of WorldWide Telescope into our maps. (Applause) This is the current — thank you — this is the current time. If we scrub the time, then we can see how the sky will look at different times, and we can get all of this very detailed information about different times, different dates: Let's move the moon a little higher in the sky, maybe change the date. I would like to kind of zoom in on the moon. So, this is an astronomically complete representation of the sky integrated right into the Earth. All right now, I've overrun my time, so I've got to stop. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

The next age of government

{0: "David Cameron is the prime minister of the UK and the leader of the UK's Conservative Party."}

TED2010

Someone once said that politics is, of course, "showbiz for ugly people." So, on that basis, I feel like I've really arrived. The other thing to think of is what an honor it is, as a politician, to give a TED talk, particularly here in the U.K., where the reputation of politics, with the expenses scandal, has sunk so low. There was even a story recently that scientists had thought about actually replacing rats in their experiments with politicians. And someone asked,"Why?" and they said, "Well, there's no shortage of politicians, no one really minds what happens to them and, after all, there are some things that rats just won't do." (Laughter) Now, I know you all love data, so I'm starting with a data-rich slide. This, I think, is the most important fact to bear in mind in British politics or American politics, and that is: We have run out of money. We have vast budget deficits. This is my global public debt clock, and, as you can see, it's 32 trillion and counting. And I think what this leads to is a very simple recognition, that there's one question in politics at the moment above all other, and it's this one: How do we make things better without spending more money? Because there isn't going to be a lot of money to improve public services, or to improve government, or to improve so many of the things that politicians talk about. So what follows from that is that if you think it's all about money — you can only measure success in public services in health care and education and policing by spending more money, you can only measure progress by spending money — you're going to have a pretty miserable time. But if you think a whole lot of other things matter that lead up to well being — things like your family relationships, friendship, community, values — then, actually, this is an incredibly exciting time to be in politics. And the really simple argument I want to make tonight, the really straightforward argument is this: That if we combine the right political philosophy, the right political thinking, with the incredible information revolution that has taken place, and that all of you know so much more about than I do, I think there's an incredible opportunity to actually remake politics, remake government, remake public services, and achieve what's up on that slide, which is a big increase in our well-being. That's the argument I want to make tonight. So, starting with the political philosophy. Now I'm not saying for a minute that British Conservatives have all the answers. Of course we don't. But there are two things at heart that I think drive a conservative philosophy that are really relevant to this whole debate. The first is this: We believe that if you give people more power and control over their lives, if you give people more choice, if you put them in the driving seat, then actually, you can create a stronger and better society. And if you marry this fact with the incredible abundance of information that we have in our world today, I think you can completely, as I've said, remake politics, remake government, remake your public services. The second thing we believe is we believe in going with the grain of human nature. Politics and politicians will only succeed if they actually try and treat with people as they are, rather than as they would like them to be. Now, if you combine this very simple, very conservative thought — go with the grain of human nature — with all the advances in behavioral economics, some of which we were just hearing about, again, I think we can achieve a real increase in well-being, in happiness, in a stronger society without necessarily having to spend a whole lot more money. Now, why do I think now is the moment to make this argument? Well, I'm afraid you're going to suffer a short, condensed history lesson about what I would say are the three passages of history: the pre-bureaucratic age, the bureaucratic age and what we now live in, which I think is a post-bureaucratic age. A simpler way of thinking of it is that we have gone from a world of local control, then we went to a world of central control, and now we're in a world of people control. Local power, central power, now, people power. Now, here is King Cnut, king a thousand years ago. Thought he could turn back the waves; couldn't turn back the waves. Couldn't actually turn back very much, because if you were king a thousand years ago, while it still took hours and hours and weeks and weeks to traverse your own country, there wasn't much you were in charge of. You weren't in charge of policing, justice, education, health, welfare. You could just about go to war and that was about it. This was the pre-bureaucratic age, an age in which everything had to be local. You had to have local control because there was no nationally-available information because travel was so restricted. So this was the pre-bureaucratic age. Next part of the cold history lesson, the lovely picture of the British Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, all sorts of transport, travel information were possible, and this gave birth to, what I like to call, the bureaucratic age. And hopefully this slide is going to morph beautifully. There we are. Suddenly, you have the big, strong, central state. It was able — but only it was able — to organize health care, education, policing, justice. And it was a world of, as I say, not local power, but now central power. It had sucked all that power up from the localities. It was able to do that itself. The next great stage, which all of you are so familiar with: the massive information revolution. Just consider this one fact: One hundred years ago, sending these 10 words cost 50 dollars. Right now, here we are linked up to Long Beach and everywhere else, and all these secret locations for a fraction of that cost, and we can send and receive huge quantities of information without it costing anything. So we're now living in a post-bureaucratic age, where genuine people power is possible. Now, what does this mean for our politics, for our public services, for our government? Well I can't, in the time I've got, give huge numbers of examples, but let me just give a few of the ways that life can change. And this is so obvious, in a way, because you think about how all of you have changed the way we shop, the way we travel, the way that business is done. That is already happened; the information and Internet revolution has actually gone all the way through our societies in so many different ways, but it hasn't, in every way, yet touched our government. So, how could this happen? Well, I think there are three chief ways that it should make an enormous difference: in transparency, in greater choice and in accountability, in giving us that genuine people power. If we take transparency, here is one of my favorite websites, the Missouri Accountability Portal. In the old days, only the government could hold the information, and only a few elected people could try and grab that information and question it and challenge it. Now here, on one website, one state in America, every single dollar spent by that government is searchable, is analyzable, is checkable. Think of the huge change that means: Any business that wants to bid for a government contract can see what currently is being spent. Anyone thinking, "I could do that service better, I could deliver it cheaper," it's all available there. We have only, in government and in politics, started to scratch the surface of what people are doing in the commercial world with the information revolution. So, complete transparency will make a huge difference. In this country, if we win the election, we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds transparent and available online, searchable for anyone to see. We're going to make every contract — we're announcing this today — available on the Internet so anyone can see what the terms are, what the conditions are, driving huge value for money, but also huge increases, I believe, in well-being as well. Choice. Now you all shop online, compare online, do everything online, and yet this revolution has hardly touched the surface of public services like education, or health care or policing, and you're going to see this change massively. We should be making this change with the information revolution in our country, with searchable health sites, so you can see what operations work out properly, what records doctors have, the cleanliness of hospitals, who does best at infection control — all of the information that would once be locked in the Department of Health is now available for all of us to see. And the third of these big changes: accountability. This, I think, is a huge change. It is a crime map. This is a crime map from Chicago. So, instead of having a situation where only the police have the information about which crimes are committed where, and we have to employ people in government to try and hold the police to account, suddenly, we've got this vast opportunity for people power, where we, as citizens, can see what crimes are being committed — where, when and by whom — and we can hold the police to account. And you can see this looks a bit like a chef's hat, but actually that's an assault, the one in blue. You can see what crime is committed where, and you have the opportunity to hold your police force to account. So those three ways — transparency, accountability and choice — will make a huge difference. Now I also said the other principle that I think we should work on is understanding of people, is recognizing that going with the grain of human nature you can achieve so much more. Now, we're got a huge revolution in understanding of why people behave in the way that they do, and a great opportunity to put that knowledge and information to greater use. We're working with some of these people. We're being advised by some of these people, as was said, to try and bring all the experience to book. Let me just give you one example that I think is incredibly simple, and I love. We want to get people to be more energy efficient. Why? It cuts fuel poverty, it cuts their bills, and it cuts carbon emissions at the same time. How do you do it? Well, we've had government information campaigns over the years when they tell you to switch off the lights when you leave the home. We even had — one government minister once told us to brush our teeth in the dark. I don't think they lasted very long. Look at what this does. This is a simple piece of behavioral economics. The best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending, to show them what their neighbors are spending, and then show what an energy conscious neighbor is spending. That sort of behavioral economics can transform people's behavior in a way that all the bullying and all the information and all the badgering from a government cannot possibly achieve. Other examples are recycling. We all know we need to recycle more. How do we make it happen? All the proof from America is that actually, if you pay people to recycle, if you give them a carrot rather than a stick, you can transform their behavior. So what does all this add up to? Here are my two favorite U.S. speeches of the last 50 years. Obviously, here we have JFK with that incredibly simple and powerful formulation, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," an incredibly noble sentiment. But when he made that speech, what could you do to build the stronger, better society? You could fight for your country, you could die for your country, you could serve in your country's civil service, but you didn't really have the information and the knowledge and the ability to help build the stronger society in the way that you do now. And I think an even more wonderful speech, which I'm going to read a big chunk of, which sums up what I said at the beginning about believing there is more to life than money, and more that we should try and measure than money. And it is Robert Kennedy's beautiful description of why gross national product captures so little: It "does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." Again, a sentiment that was so noble and beautifully put 40 years ago, and a beautiful dream 40 years ago, but now with the huge advances in information technology, with the massive changes in behavioral economics, with all that we know about how you advance well-being, that if we combine those insights of giving power to people, and using information to make that possible, and using the insight of going with the grain of human nature, while at the same time, understanding why people behave in the way they do, it is a dream more easy to realize today than it was when it was made in that beautiful speech 40 years ago. Thank you. (Applause)

The opportunity of adversity

{0: 'A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and advocate for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics. '}

TEDMED 2009

I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what I'd find. Let me read you the entry. "Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Here's the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, it's not much better. I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome." So, it's not just about the words. It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead? One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children. I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands — different colors, you know — to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything — I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session — exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions — and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks." Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them — not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. Implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It's part of our life. And I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it. This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. Conflict is the genesis of creation. From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. So, we can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. Maybe we can see it as change. Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet. I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. Now, who's normal? There's no normal. There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? (Laughter) I don't think so. If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility — or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous — we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community. Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable. A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. It was summertime: I had shorts on. I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is. And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you." He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb." (Laughter) Oh, that guy. And, but of course, actually, it did click. This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer — this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news. He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." (Laughter) (Applause) The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me. See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. If you can hand somebody the key to their own power — the human spirit is so receptive — if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. In fact, the exact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." It means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." So again, which potential do we want to bring out? There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. It's called the streaming trials. We call it "tracking" here in the States. It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level. And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. They were simply told, "These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them. So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being. I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "The God Who Only Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'" Thank you. (Applause)

Innovating to zero!

{0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation."}

TED2010

I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. And that might seem a bit surprising, because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: there will be too much rain, not enough rain; things will change in ways their fragile environment simply can't support. And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. Also, the price of energy is very important to them. In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. Now, the price of energy has come down over time. Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. But as we make it cheaper — and let's say, let's go for making it twice as cheap — we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be, and where the positive feedbacks are — there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's a big challenge. It's very different than saying, "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." This is something that has to get to zero. Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year — over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication. So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. So let's look at each one of these, and see how we can get this down to zero. Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. (Laughter) That's back from high school algebra. But let's take a look. First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3. The second factor is the services we use. This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. These are very good things. Getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. And it's a great thing for this number to go up. In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their schoolwork under the street lamps. Now, efficiency, "E," the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. We have something that's not going up. Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings — there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. There are other services, like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. And so overall, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. So let's look at this fourth factor — this is going to be a key one — and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. So the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? If you burn coal, no. If you burn natural gas, no. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. So we need energy miracles. Now, when I use the term "miracle," I don't mean something that's impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The Internet and its services are a miracle. So the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. Usually, we don't have a deadline where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline. Now, I thought, "How could I really capture this? Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that. (Laughter) It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitoes. With energy, all I could come up with is this. I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. So here we have some natural fireflies. I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. (Laughter) Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability. And although there's many directions that people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better. But my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. Let's look first at burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. What you need to do there seems like it might be simple, but it's not. And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now, we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level. But getting up to that full percentage — that will be very tricky. And agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue: Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one. Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? Although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. The last three of the five, I've grouped together. These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. And they actually — although it's great they don't require fuel — they have some disadvantages. One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of times more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. So we've got big cost challenges here. We have transmission challenges; for example, say this energy source is outside your country, you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. And, finally, this storage problem. To dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries made — for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything — and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses. What I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. Now, how are we going to go forward on this — what's the right approach? Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this — hundreds. In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. A lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy." That's good. And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod Khosla is investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. Innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium — the one percent, which is the U235 — we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right materials approach, this looks like it would work. And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So instead of worrying about them, you just take that, it's a great thing. It breeds this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. You see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the US for hundreds of years. And simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? What should our report card look like? Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important, that we get there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries — still some agriculture; hopefully, we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? That's super important. That's a key element of making that report card. Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? Well, again, it should have the two elements. We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. The Al Gore book, "Our Choice," and the David MacKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. There's a lot that has to come together. So this is a wish. It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years — I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented — this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact. If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the US and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all, the lives of those two billion will be far worse. So what do we have to do? What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? We need to go for more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda. You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. We do need the market incentives — CO2 tax, cap and trade — something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the message out. We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause ends) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) CA: Thank you. So to understand more about TerraPower. I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? Bill Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions. And even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. The tough thing is building the pilot reactor — finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. CA: So to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground, almost like a vertical column of nuclear fuel, of this spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down? BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, where you're opening it up and moving things in and out — that's not good. So if you have very — (Laughter) very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in — just think of it as a log — put it down and not have those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done. CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution. BG: Yeah; what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there — there's a lot less waste under this approach — then you can actually take that and put it into another one and burn that. And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors — that's our fuel to begin with. So the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. CA: You're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities. Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this? BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called "nuclear." So we've got a lot of interest. People from the company have been in Russia, India, China. I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. So I'm optimistic. The French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on something that has been done. It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? BG: Well, we need — for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. And TerraPower — if things go well, which is wishing for a lot — could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies — we need it to be hundreds — who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to succeed. CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changers, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there? BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. And so, if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. CA: If this doesn't work, then what? Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now, that's just an insurance policy; you hope you don't need to do that. Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about: Should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect? CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong? BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. Are they saying there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. The main problem we have here — it's kind of like with AIDS: you make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing. In fact, the IPCC report — that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "OK, that isn't that big of a deal." The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, "OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2. But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before." (Applause) CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece — say the US should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now — it's not that dramatic. It shouldn't take away from other things. The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that — that, to me, mostly is a waste. Unless you're very close, and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. If the trade-off you get into is, "Let's make energy super expensive," then the rich can afford that. I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. The disaster is for that two billion. And even Lomborg has changed. His shtick now is, "Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. The R&D piece — it's crazy how little it's funded. CA: Well, Bill, I suspect I speak on behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. Thank you so much. BG: Thank you. (Applause)

Technology's epic story

{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.'}

TEDxAmsterdam

I want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives — not just our immediate life, but in the cosmic sense, in the kind of long history of the world and our place in the world. What is this stuff? What is the significance? And so, I want to kind of go through my little story of what I found out. One of the first things I started to investigate was the history of the name of technology. In the United States, there is a State of the Union address given by every president since 1790. And each one of those is kind of summing up the most important things for the United States at that time. If you search for the word "technology," it was not used until 1952. So, technology was sort of absent from everybody's thinking until 1952, which happened to be the year of my birth. And obviously, technology had existed before then, but we weren't aware of it. And so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life. I actually did research to find out the first use of the word "technology." It was in 1829, and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum — a course, bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts, and industry — and he called it "Technology." And that's the very first use of the word. So what is this stuff that we're all consumed by and bothered by? Alan Kay calls it, "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born." (Laughter) Which is sort of the idea we normally have about what technology is: it's all that new stuff. It's not roads, or penicillin, or factory tires; it's the new stuff. My friend Danny Hillis says kind of a similar one, he says, "Technology is anything that doesn't work yet." (Laughter) Which is, again, a sense that it's all new. But we know that it's just not new. It actually goes way back, and what I want to suggest is, it goes a long way back. So, another way to think about technology, what it means, is to imagine a world without technology. If we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today — and I mean everything, from blades to scrapers to cloth — we, as a species, would not live very long. We would die by the billions, and very quickly: the wolves would get us, we would be defenseless, we would be unable to grow enough food or find enough food. Even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools. So, they had minimal technology, but they had some technology. And if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes and the Neanderthal, which are very similar to early man, we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology, and this is a kind of a curve of their average age. There are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we've ever found, and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30. There are very few young infants, because they die — high mortality rate — and there's very few old people. So the profile is sort of for your average San Francisco neighborhood: a lot of young people. And if you go there, you say, "Hey, everybody's really healthy." Well, that's because they're all young. Same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man: you didn't live beyond the age of 30. So it was a world without grandparents. And grandparents are very important, because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information. Imagine a world where basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old. How much learning can you do? You can't do very much learning in your own life, it's so short, and there's nobody to pass on what you do learn. So that's one aspect. It was a very short life. But at the same time, anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world, with that very little technology, actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food they needed: three to six hours a day. Some anthropologists call that the original affluent society, because they had bankers' hours, basically. So it was possible to get enough food. But when the scarcity came, when the highs and lows and the droughts came, then people went into starvation. And that's why they didn't live very long. So what technology brought, through the very simple tools like these stone tools here — even something as small as this — the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction about 250 megafauna animals in North America when they first arrived 10,000 years ago. So, long before the industrial age, we've been affecting the planet on a global scale with just a small amount of technology. The other thing that the early man invented was fire. And fire was used to clear out, and again, affected the ecology of grass and whole continents, and was used in cooking. It enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things. It was, in a certain sense, in a McLuhan sense, an external stomach, in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise. And if we didn't have fire, we actually could not live. Our bodies have adapted to these new diets. Our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years. So, with that little bit of technology, humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so — the same number as Neanderthals everywhere — and we suddenly exploded. With the invention of language around 50,000 years ago, the number of humans exploded, and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet. And they migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until, within several tens of thousands of years, we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species, with a very small amount of technology. And even at that time, with the introduction of agriculture, 8,000, 10,000 years ago, we started to see climate change. So climate change is not a new thing; what's new is just the degree of it. Even during the agricultural age, there was climate change. So already, small amounts of technology were transforming the world. And what this means, and where I'm going, is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world. All the things we see today that are changing our lives, we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology. So it's a force, that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet, and in such a degree, that I think it's become who we are. In fact, our humanity and everything that we think about ourselves, is something we've invented. So we've invented ourselves. Of all the animals that we've domesticated, the most important animal has been us. So humanity is our greatest invention, but of course, we're not done yet. We're still inventing, and this is what technology is allowing us to do; it's continually to reinvent ourselves. It's a very, very strong force. I call this entire thing — us humans as our technology, everything that we've made, gadgets in our lives — we call that the technium. That's this world. My working definition of technology is: anything useful that a human mind makes. It's not just hammers and gadgets, like laptops. But it's also law. And, of course, cities are ways to make things more useful to us. While this is something that comes from our mind, it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos. It goes back. The origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang, in this way, in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the Big Bang and goes through galaxies and stars, into life, into us. And the three major phases of the early universe was energy, when the dominant force was energy; then the dominant force, as it cooled, became matter; and then, with the invention of life four billion years ago, the dominant force in our neighborhood became information. That's what life is: an information process that was restructuring and making new order. So, energy and matter, Einstein showed were equivalent, and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated. So it's one long continuum. You put energy into the right kind of system, and out comes wasted heat, entropy, and extropy, which is order. It's the increased order. Where does this order come from? Its roots go way back. We actually don't know. But we do know that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long, and it began with things like galaxies; they maintained their order for billions of years. Stars are basically nuclear fission machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years: order against the extropy of the world. And flowers and plants are the same thing, extended, and technology is basically an extension of life. One trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this is actually increasing. The amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence. And the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star — because of the star's long lifespan, the energy density in life is actually higher than a star. And the energy density that we see in the greatest amount anywhere in the universe is actually in a PC chip. There is more energy flowing through, per gram per second, than anything that we have any other experience with. And so, what I would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going, we continue that trajectory, and we say, "Well, it's going to become more energy-dense, that's where it's going." And so what I've done is, I've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say, "What are the general trends in evolutionary life?" And there are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, sentience, ubiquity, and most important, evolvability. Those very same things are also present in technology. That's where technology is going. In fact, technology is accelerating all the aspects of life. And we can see that happening; just as there's diversity in life, there's more diversity in things we make. Things in life start off being general cells, and they become specialized: you have tissue cells, muscle, brain cells. The same thing happens with, say, a hammer, which is general at first and becomes more specific. So I would like to say that while there are six kingdoms of life, we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life. It's a branching off from the human form. But technology has its own agenda, like anything, like life itself. For instance, right now, three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the technium itself. In transportation, it's not to move us; it's to move the stuff we make or buy. I use the word "want." Technology wants. This is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power. Your cat wants more food. A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light. It has an urge, and technology has an urge. At the same time, it wants to give us things, and what it gives us is basically progress. You can take all kinds of curves, and they're all pointing up. There's really no dispute about progress, if we discount the cost of that. And that's the thing that bothers most people, is that progress is really real, but we wonder and question: What are the environmental costs of it? I did a survey of the number of species of artifacts in my house, and there's 6,000. Other people have come up with 10,000. When King Henry of England died, he had 18,000 things in his house, but that was the entire wealth of England, so ... (Laughter) And with that entire wealth of England, King Henry could not buy any antibiotics, he could not buy refrigeration, he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles, whereas this rickshaw wallah in India could save up and buy antibiotics and he could buy refrigeration. He could buy things that King Henry, in all his wealth, could never buy. That's what progress is about. So, technology is selfish; technology is generous. That conflict, that tension, will be with us forever: sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do, and sometimes it's going to do things for us. We have confusion about what we should think about a new technology. Right now the default position when a new technology comes along, is people talk about the precautionary principle, which is very common in Europe, which says, basically, "Don't do anything. When you meet a new technology, stop, until it can be proven that it does no harm." I think that really leads nowhere. But a better way is what I call the proactionary principle, which is, you engage with technology. You try it out. You obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests, you try to anticipate it, but after anticipating it, you constantly asses it, not just once, but eternally. And when it diverts from what you want, we prioritize risk, we evaluate not just the new stuff, but the old stuff. We fix it; but most importantly, we relocate it. And what I mean by that is, we find a new job for it. Nuclear energy, fission, is a really bad idea for bombs. But it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity, instead of burning coal. When we have a bad idea, the response to a bad idea is not no ideas, it's not to stop thinking. The response to a bad idea — like, say, a tungsten lightbulb — is a better idea. So, better ideas is really always the response to technology we don't like; it's basically better technology. And actually, in a certain sense, technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas, if you can think about it that way. So, maybe spraying DDT on crops is a really bad idea. But DDT sprayed on local homes — there's nothing better to eliminate malaria, besides insect DDT-impregnated mosquito nets. But that's a really good idea; that's a good job for technology. So our job as humans is to parent our mind children, to find them good friends, to find them a good job. And so, every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job. That's actually my son, right here. (Laughter) There are no bad technologies, just as there are no bad children. We don't say children are neutral; children are positive. We just have to find them the right place. And so, what technology gives us over the long term — over this sort of extended evolution from the beginning of time, through the invention of the plants and animals, and the evolution of life, the evolution of brains — what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences: It's increasing diversity, it's increasing options, it's increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. That's what we get from technology all the time. That's why people leave villages and go into cities — because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities. And we are aware of the price; we pay a price for that, but we're aware of it, and generally, we will pay the price for increased freedoms, choices and opportunities. Even technology wants clean water. Is technology diametrically opposed to nature? Because technology is an extension of life, it's in parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants. So that I think technology loves biology, if we allow it to. Great movement starting billions of years ago is moving through us and it continues to go, and our choice, so to speak, in technology, is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves. So, technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket; it's more than just gadgets, it's more than just things that people invent. It's actually part of a very long story — a great story — that began billions of years ago. It's moving through us, this self-organization, and we're extending and accelerating it, and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it. And I really appreciate your attention today. Thank you. (Applause)

Four ways to fix a broken legal system

{0: 'Philip K. Howard is the founder of Common Good, a drive to overhaul the US legal system. His new book is "Try Common Sense."'}

TED2010

I've always been interested in the relationship of formal structures and human behavior. If you build a wide road out to the outskirts of town, people will move there. Well, law is also a powerful driver of human behavior. And what I'd like to discuss today is the need to overhaul and simplify the law to release the energy and passion of Americans, so that we can begin to address the challenges of our society. You might have noticed that law has grown progressively denser in your lives over the last decade or two. If you run a business, it's hard to do much of anything without calling your general counsel. Indeed, there is this phenomenon now where the general counsels are becoming the CEOs. It's a little bit like the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. You need a lawyer to run the company, because there's so much law. But it's not just business that's affected by this, it's actually pressed down into the daily activities of ordinary people. A couple of years ago I was hiking near Cody, Wyoming. It was in a grizzly bear preserve, although no one told me that before we went. And our guide was a local science teacher. She was wholly unconcerned about the bears, but she was terrified of lawyers. The stories started pouring out. She'd just been involved in an episode where a parent had threatened to sue the school because she lowered the grade of the student by 10 percent when he turned the paper in late. The principal didn't want to stand up to the parent because he didn't want to get dragged into some legal proceedings. So, she had to go to meeting after meeting, same arguments made over and over again. After 30 days of sleepless nights, she finally capitulated and raised the grade. She said, "Life's too short, I just can't keep going with this." About the same time, she was going to take two students to a leadership conference in Laramie, which is a couple of hours away, and she was going to drive them in her car, but the school said, "No, you can't drive them in the car for liability reasons. You have to go in a school bus." So, they provided a bus that held 60 people and drove the three of them back and forth several hours to Laramie. Her husband is also a science teacher, and he takes his biology class on a hike in the nearby national park. But he was told he couldn't go on the hike this year because one of the students in the class was disabled, so the other 25 students didn't get to go on the hike either. At the end of this day I could have filled a book just with stories about law from this one teacher. Now, we've been taught to believe that law is the foundation of freedom. But somehow or another, in the last couple of decades, the land of the free has become a legal minefield. It's really changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible; and yet, when you pull back, you see it all the time. It's changed the way we talk. I was talking to a pediatrician friend in North Carolina. He said, "Well you know, I don't deal with patients the same way anymore. You wouldn't want to say something off-the-cuff that might be used against you." This is a doctor, whose life is caring for people. My own law firm has a list of questions that I'm not allowed to ask when interviewing candidates, such as the sinister question, bulging with hidden motives and innuendo, "Where are you from?" (Laughter) Now for 20 years, tort reformers have been sounding the alarm that lawsuits are out of control. And we read every once in while about these crazy lawsuits, like the guy in the District of Columbia who sued his dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost his pair of pants. The case went on for two years; I think he's still appealing the case. But the reality is, these crazy cases are relatively rare. They don't usually win. And the total of direct tort cost in this country is about two percent, which is twice as much as in other countries but, as taxes go, hardly crippling. But the direct costs are really only the tip of the iceberg. What's happened here, again, almost without our knowing, is our culture has changed. People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment. So, what do we do about it? We certainly don't want to give up the rights, when people do something wrong, to seek redress in the courts. We need regulation to make sure people don't pollute and such. We lack even a vocabulary to deal with this problem, and that's because we have the wrong frame of reference. We've been trained to think that the way to look at every dispute, every issue, is a matter of kind of individual rights. And so we peer through a legal microscope, and look at everything. Is it possible that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why Johnny turned his paper in late in Cody, Wyoming? Is it possible that the doctor might have done something differently when the sick person gets sicker? And of course the hindsight bias is perfect. There's always a different scenario that you can sketch out where it's possible that something could have been done differently. And yet, we've been trained to squint into this legal microscope, hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society, where everyone will agree what's fair, and where accidents will be extinct, risk will be no more. Of course, this is Utopia; it's a formula for paralysis, not freedom. It's not the basis of the rule of law, it's not the basis of a free society. So, now I have the first of four propositions I'm going to leave with you about how you simplify the law: You've got to judge law mainly by its effect on the broader society, not individual disputes. Absolutely vital. So, let's pull back from the anecdotes for a second and look at our society from high above. Is it working? What does the macro-data show us? Well, the healthcare system has been transformed: a culture pervaded with defensiveness, universal distrust of the system of justice, universal practice of defensive medicine. It's very hard to measure because there are mixed motives. Doctors can make more on ordering tests sometimes, and also they no longer even know what's right or wrong. But reliable estimates range between 60 billion and 200 billion dollars per year. That's enough to provide care to all the people in America who don't have it. The trial lawyers say, "Well, this legal fear makes doctors practice better medicine." Well that's been studied too, by the Institute of Medicine and others. Turns out that's not the case. The fear has chilled professional interaction so thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors are afraid to speak up: "Are you sure that's the right dosage?" Because they're not sure, and they don't want to take legal responsibility. Let's go to schools. As we saw with the teacher in Cody, Wyoming, she seems to be affected by the law. Well it turns out the schools are literally drowning in law. You could have a separate section of a law library around each of the following legal concepts: due process, special education, no child left behind, zero tolerance, work rules ... it goes on. We did a study of all the rules that affect one school in New York. The Board of Ed. had no idea. Tens of thousands of discreet rules, 60 steps to suspend a student from school: It's a formula for paralysis. What's the effect of that? One is a decline in order. Again, studies have shown it's directly attributable to the rise of due process. Public agenda did a survey for us a couple of years ago where they found that 43 percent of the high school teachers in America say that they spend at least half of their time maintaining order in the classroom. That means those students are getting half the learning they're supposed to, because if one child is disrupting the class no one can learn. And what happens when the teacher tries to assert order? They're threatened with a legal claim. We also surveyed that. Seventy-eight percent of the middle and high school teachers in America have been threatened by their students with violating their rights, with lawsuits by their students. They are threatening, their students. It's not that they usually sue, it's not that they would win, but it's an indication of the corrosion of authority. And how has this system of law worked for government? It doesn't seem to be working very well does it? Neither in Sacramento nor in Washington. The other day at the State of the Union speech, President Obama said, and I think we could all agree with this goal, "From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been the first to compete. There is no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains." Well, actually there is a reason: Environmental review has evolved into a process of no pebble left unturned for any major project taking the better part of a decade, then followed by years of litigation by anybody who doesn't like the project. Then, just staying above the Earth for one more second, people are acting like idiots, (Laughter) all across the country. (Applause) Idiots. A couple of years ago, Broward County, Florida, banned running at recess. (Laughter) That means all the boys are going to be ADD. I mean it's just absolutely a formula for failure. My favorite, though, are all the warning labels. "Caution: Contents are hot," on billions of coffee cups. Archeologists will dig us up in a thousand years and they won't know about defensive medicine and stuff, but they'll see all these labels, "Contents are extremely hot." They'll think it was some kind of aphrodisiac. That's the only explanation. Because why would you have to tell people that something was actually hot? My favorite warning was one on a five-inch fishing lure. I grew up in the South and whiled away the summers fishing. Five-inch fishing lure, it's a big fishing lure, with a three pronged hook in the back, and outside it said, "Harmful if swallowed." (Laughter) So, none of these people are doing what they think is right. And why not? They don't trust the law. Why don't they trust the law? Because it gives us the worst of both worlds: It's random — anybody can sue for almost anything and take it to a jury, not even an effort at consistency — and it's also too detailed. In the areas that are regulated, there are so many rules no human could possibly know it. Well how do you fix it? We could spend 10,000 lifetimes trying to prune this legal jungle. But the challenge here is not one of just amending the law, because the hurdle for success is trust. People — for law to be the platform for freedom, people have to trust it. So, that's my second proposition: Trust is an essential condition to a free society. Life is complicated enough without legal fear. But law is different than other kinds of uncertainties, because it carries with it the power of state. And so the state can come in. It actually changes the way people think. It's like having a little lawyer on your shoulders all day long, whispering in your ear, "Could that go wrong? Might that go wrong?" It drives people from the smart part of the brain — that dark, deep well of the subconscious, where instincts and experience, and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are — it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic. Pretty soon the doctor's saying, "Well, I doubt if that headache could be a tumor, but who would protect me if it were? So maybe I'll just order the MRI." Then you've wasted 200 billion dollars in unnecessary tests. If you make people self-conscious about their judgments, studies show you will make them make worse judgments. If you tell the pianist to think about how she's hitting the notes when she's playing the piece, she can't play the piece. Self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment. Edison stated it best. He said, "Hell, we ain't got no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something." (Laughter) So, how do you restore trust? Tweaking the law's clearly not good enough, and tort reform, which is a great idea, lowers your cost if you're a businessperson, but it's like a Band-Aid on this gaping wound of distrust. States with extensive tort reform still suffer all these pathologies. So, what's needed is not just to limit claims, but actually create a dry ground of freedom. It turns out that freedom actually has a formal structure. And it is this: Law sets boundaries, and on one side of those boundaries are all the things you can't do or must do — you can't steal, you've got to pay your taxes — but those same boundaries are supposed to define and protect a dry ground of freedom. Isaiah Berlin put it this way: "Law sets frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men shall be inviolable." We've forgotten that second part. Those dikes have burst. People wade through law all day long. So, what's needed now is to rebuild these boundaries. And it's especially important to rebuild them for lawsuits. Because what people can sue for establishes the boundaries for everybody else's freedom. If someone brings a lawsuit over, "A kid fell off the seesaw," it doesn't matter what happens in the lawsuit, all the seesaws will disappear. Because no one will want to take the risk of a lawsuit. And that's what's happened. There are no seesaws, jungle gyms, merry-go-rounds, climbing ropes, nothing that would interest a kid over the age of four, because there's no risk associated with it. So, how do we rebuild it? Life is too complex for... (Applause) Life is too complex for a software program. All these choices involve value judgments and social norms, not objective facts. And so here is the fourth proposition. This is what we have, the philosophy we have to change to. And there are two essential elements of it: We have to simplify the law. We have to migrate from all this complexity towards general principles and goals. The constitution is only 16 pages long. Worked pretty well for 200 years. Law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices. If they can't internalize it, they won't trust it. And how do you make it simple? Because life is complex, and here is the hardest and biggest change: We have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law. (Applause) We have to rehumanize the law. To make law simple so that you feel free, the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to interpret and apply the law in accord with reasonable social norms. As you're going down, and walking down the sidewalk during the day, you have to think that if there is a dispute, there's somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you're acting reasonably. That person doesn't exist today. This is the hardest hurdle. It's actually not very hard. Ninety-eight percent of cases, this is a piece of cake. Maybe you've got a claim in small claims court for your lost pair of pants for $100, but not in a court of general jurisdiction for millions of dollars. Case dismissed without prejudice or refiling in small claims court. Takes five minutes. That's it, it's not that hard. But it's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values: racism, gender discrimination, pollution — they were bad values. And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore. The problem is, we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values. It doesn't mean that people in authority can do whatever they want. They're still bounded by legal goals and principles: The teacher is accountable to the principal, the judge is accountable to an appellate court, the president is accountable to voters. But the accountability's up the line judging the decision against the effect on everybody, not just on the disgruntled person. You can't run a society by the lowest common denominator. (Applause) So, what's needed is a basic shift in philosophy. We can pull the plug on a lot of this stuff if we shift our philosophy. We've been taught that authority is the enemy of freedom. It's not true. Authority, in fact, is essential to freedom. Law is a human institution; responsibility is a human institution. If teachers don't have authority to run the classroom, to maintain order, everybody's learning suffers. If the judge doesn't have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims, then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders. If the environmental agency can't decide that the power lines are good for the environment, then there's no way to bring the power from the wind farms to the city. A free society requires red lights and green lights, otherwise it soon descends into gridlock. That's what's happened to America. Look around. What the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices. It's the only way to get our freedom back, and it's the only way to release the energy and passion needed so that we can meet the challenges of our time. Thank you. (Applause)

The wireless future of medicine

{0: 'Eric Topol is a leading cardiologist who has embraced the study of genomics and the latest advances in technology to treat chronic disease. '}

TEDMED 2009

Does anybody know when the stethoscope was invented? Any guesses? 1816. And what I can say is, in 2016, doctors aren't going to be walking around with stethoscopes. There's a whole lot better technology coming, and that's part of the change in medicine. What has changed our society has been wireless devices. But the future are digital medical wireless devices, OK? So, let me give you some examples of this to kind of make this much more concrete. This is the first one. This is an electrocardiogram. And, as a cardiologist, to think that you could see in real time a patient, an individual, anywhere in the world on your smartphone, watching your rhythm — that's incredible, and it's with us today. But that's just the beginning. You check your email while you're sitting here. In the future you're going to be checking all your vital signs, all your vital signs: your heart rhythm, your blood pressure, your oxygen, your temperature, etc. This is already available today. This is AirStrip Technologies. It's now wired — or I should say, wireless — by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, and putting it on a smartphone for physicians. If you're an expectant parent, what about the ability to monitor, continuously, fetal heart rate, or intrauterine contractions, and not having to worry so much that things are fine as the pregnancy, and moving over into the time of delivery? And then as we go further, today we have continuous glucose sensors. Right now, they are under the skin, but in the future, they won't have to be implanted. And of course, the desired range — trying to keep glucose between 75 and less than 200, checking it every five minutes in a continuous glucose sensor — you'll see how that can impact diabetes. And what about sleep? We're going to zoom in on that a little bit. We're supposed to spend a third of our life in sleep. What if, on your phone, which will be available in the next few weeks, you had every minute of your sleep displayed? And this is, of course, as you can see, the awake is the orange. The REM sleep, rapid eye movement, dream state, is in light green; and light is gray, light sleep; and deep sleep, the best restorative sleep, is that dark green. How about counting every calorie? And this is ability, in real time, to actually take measurements of caloric intake as well as expenditure, through a Band-Aid. Now, what I've talked about are physiologic metrics. But what I want to get to, the next frontier, very quickly, and why the stethoscope is on its way out, is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds, and the breath sounds, because now, introduced by G.E. is a handheld ultra-sound. Why is this important? Because this is so much more sensitive. Here is an example of an abdominal ultrasound, and also a cardiac echo, which can be sent wireless, and then there's an example of fetal monitoring on your smartphone. So, we're not just talking about physiologic metrics — the key measurements of vital signs, and all those things in physiology — but also all the imaging that one could look at in your smartphone. Now, this is an example of another obsolete technology, soon to be buried: the Holter Monitor. Twenty-four hour recording, lots of wires. This is now a little tiny patch. You can put it on for two weeks and send it in the mail. Now, how does this work? Well, there is these smart Band-Aids or these sensors that one would put on, on a shoe or on the wrist. And this sends a signal and it creates a body area network to a gateway. Gateway could be a smartphone or it could be a dedicated gateway, as today many of these things are dedicated gateways, because they are not so well integrated. That signal goes to the web, the cloud, and then it can be processed and sent anywhere: to a caregiver, to a physician, back to the patient, etc. So, that's basically very simplistic technology of how this works. Now, I have this device on. I didn't want to take my shirt off to show you, but I can tell you it's on. This is a device that not only measures cardiac rhythm, as you saw already, but it also goes well beyond that. This is me now. And you can see the ECG. Below that's the actual heart rate and the trend; to the right of that is a bioconductant. That's the fluid status, fluid status, that's really important if you're monitoring somebody with heart failure. And below that's temperature, and respiration, and oxygen, and then the position activity. So, this is really striking, because this device measures seven things that are very much vital signs for monitoring someone with heart failure. OK? And why is this important? Well, this is the most expensive bed. What if we could reduce the need for hospital beds? Well, we can. First of all, heart failure is the number one reason for hospital admissions and readmissions in this country. The cost of heart failure is 37 billion dollars a year, which is 80 percent related to hospitalization. And in the course of 30 days after a hospital stay for a Medicare greater than 65 years or older, is — 27 percent are readmitted in 30 days, and by six months, over 56 percent are readmitted. So, can we improve that? Well the idea is we take this device that I'm wearing, and we put it on 600 patients with heart failure, randomly assigned, versus 600 patients who don't have active monitoring, and see whether we can reduce heart failure readmissions, and that's exciting. And we'll start that trial, and you'll hear more about how we're going to do that, but that's a type of wireless device trial that could change medicine in the years ahead. Why now? Why has this all of a sudden become a reality, an exciting direction in the future of medicine? What we have is, in a way, a perfect positive storm. This sets up consumer-driven healthcare. That's where this is all starting. Let me just give you specifics about why this is a big movement if you're not aware of it: 1.2 million Americans have gotten a Nike shoe, which is a body-area network that connects the shoe, the sole of the shoe to the iPhone, or an iPod. And this Wired Magazine cover article really captured a lot of this; it talked a lot about the Nike shoe and how quickly that's been adopted to monitor exercise physiology and energy expenditure. Here are some things, the principles that are guiding principles to keep in mind: "A data-driven health revolution promises to make us all better, faster, and stronger. Living by numbers." And this one, which is really telling, this was from July, this cover article: "The personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise. It's about tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365." Well, I tried this device. A lot of you have gotten that Phillips Direct Life. I didn't have one of those, but I got the Fitbit. That looks like this. It's like a wireless accelerometer, pedometer. And I want to just give you the results of that testing, because I wanted to understand about the consumer movement. I hope the, by the way, the Phillips Direct Life works better — I hope so. But this monitors food, it monitors activity and tracks weight. However you have to put in most of this stuff. The only thing it really tracks by itself is activity, and even then, it's not complete. So, you exercise and it picks up the exercise. You put in your height and weight, it calculates BMI, and of course it tells you how many calories you're expending from the exercise, and how many you took in, if you go in and enter all the foods. But it really wants you to enter all your activity. And so I went to this, and of course I was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise, elliptical exercise I did, but then it wants more information. So, it says, "You want to log sexual activity. How long did you do it for?" (Laughter) And it says, "How hard was it?" (Laughter) Furthermore it says, "Start time." Now, this doesn't appear — this just doesn't work, I mean, this just doesn't work. So, now I want to move to sleep. Who would ever have thought you could have your own EEG at your home, tagged to a very nice alarm clock, by the way? This is the headband that goes with this alarm clock. It monitors your brainwaves continuously, when you're sleeping. So, I did this thing for seven days getting ready for TEDMed. This is an important part of our life, one-third you're supposed to be sleeping. Of course how many here have any problems with sleeping? It's usually 90 percent. So, you tell me you sleep better than expected. Okay, well this was a week of my life in sleeping, and you get a Z.Q. score. Instead of an I.Q. score, you get a Z.Q. score when you wake up. You say, "Oh, OK." And a Z.Q. score is adjusted to age, and you want to get as high as you possibly can. So this is the moment-by-moment, or minute-by-minute sleep. And you see that Z.Q. there was 80-odd. And the wake time is in orange. And this can be a problem, as I learned. Because it not only helps you with quantifying your sleep, but also tells others you're awake. So, when my wife came in and she could tell you're awake. "Eric, I want to talk. I want to talk." And I'm trying to play possum. This thing is very, very impressive. OK. So, that's the first night. And this one is now 67, and that's not a good score. And this tells you, of course, how much you had in REM sleep, in deep sleep, and all this sort of thing. This was really fascinating because this gave that quantitation about all the different phases of sleep. So, it also then tells you how you do compared to your age group. It's like a managed competition of sleep. And really interesting stuff. Look at this thing and say, "Well, I didn't think I was a very good sleeper, but actually I did better than average in 50 to 60 year olds." OK? And the key thing was, what I didn't know, was that I was a really good dreamer. OK. Now let's move from sleep to diseases. Eighty percent of Americans have chronic disease, or 80 percent of age greater than 65 have two or more chronic disease, 140 million Americans have one or more chronic disease, and 80 percent of our 1.5, whatever, trillion expenditures are related to chronic disease. Now, diabetes is one of the big ones. Almost 24 million people have diabetes. And here is the latest map. It was published just a little more than a week ago in the New York Times, and it isn't looking good. That is, for men, 29 percent in the country over 60 have Type II diabetes, and women, although it's less, it's terribly high. But of course we have a way to measure that now on a continuous basis, with a sensor that detects blood glucose, and it's important because we could detect hyperglycemia that otherwise wouldn't be known, and also hypoglycemia. And you can see the red dots, in this particular patient's case, were finger sticks, which would have missed both ends. But by continuous monitoring, it captures all that vital information. The future of this though, is being able to move this to a Band-Aid type phenomenon, and that's not so far away. So, let me just give you, very quickly, 10 top targets for wireless medicine. All these things are possible — some of them are very close, or already, as you heard, are available today, in some way or form. Alzheimer's disease: there's five million people affected, and you can check vital signs, activity, balance. Asthma: large number, we could detect things like pollen count, air quality, respiratory rate. Breast cancer, I'll show you an example of that real quickly. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Depression, there's a great approach to that in mood disorders. Diabetes I've just mentioned. Heart failure we already talked about. Hypertension: 74 million people could have continuous blood-pressure monitoring to come up with much better management and prevention. And obesity we already talked about, the ways to get to that. And sleep disorders. This is effective around the world. The access to smartphones and cell phones today is extraordinary. And this article from The Economist summed it up beautifully about the opportunities in health across the developing world: "Mobile phones made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology." And that's before we got going on the m-health world. Aging: The problem is enormous, 300,000 broken hips per year; but the solutions are extraordinary, and they include so many different things. One of the ones I just wanted to mention: The iShoe is another example of a sensor that improves proprioception among the elderly to prevent falling. One of many different techniques using wireless sensors. So, we can change medicine across the continuum of care, across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors; the pharmaceutical arena changes; the full spectrum of disease — I hope I've given you a sense of that — across the globe. There are two things that can really accelerate this whole process. One of them — we're very fortunate — is to develop a dedicated institute and that's work that started with the work that Scripps with Qualcomm ... and then the great fortune of meeting up with Gary and Mary West, to get behind this wireless health institute. San Diego is an extraordinary place for this. There's over 650 wireless companies, 100 of which or more are working in wireless health. It's the number one source of commerce, and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies. The wireless institute, the West Wireless Health Institute, is really the outgrowth of two extraordinary people who are here this evening: Gary and Mary West. And I'd like to give it up for them for getting behind this. (Applause) Their fantastic philanthropic investment made this possible, and this is really a nonprofit education center which is just about to open. It looks like this, this whole building dedicated. And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate — and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday — then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics. The other big thing, besides having this fantastic institute to catalyze this process is guidance, and that's of course relying on the fact that medicine goes digital. If we understand biology from genomics and omics and wireless through physiologic phenotyping, that's big. Because what it does is allow a convergence like we've never had before. Over 80 major diseases have been cracked at the genomic level, but this is quite extraordinary: More has been learned about the underpinnings of disease in the last two and a half years than in the history of man. And when you put that together with, for example, now an app for the iPhone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ... but, the future — we can now tell who's going to get Type II diabetes from all the common variants, and that's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future. We can tell who's going to get breast cancer from the various genes. We can also know who's likely to get atrial fibrillation. And finally, another example: sudden cardiac death. Each of these has a sensor. We can give glucose a sensor for diabetes to prevent it. We can prevent, or have the earliest detection possible, for breast cancer with an ultrasound device given to the patient. An iPatch, iRhythm, for atrial fibrillation. And vital-signs monitoring to prevent sudden cardiac death. We lose 700,000 people a year in the U.S. from sudden cardiac death. So, I hope I've convinced you of this, of the impact on hospital clinic resources is profound and then the impact on diseases is equally impressive across all these different diseases and more. It's really taking individualized medicine to a new height and it's hyper-innovative, and I think it represents the black swan of medicine. Thanks for your attention. (Applause)